Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  With stoic patience, Barach began to question her about how many powders she had actually taken. Not enough, it turned out. Evidently he did not suppose her to be in serious danger, because he only reserved a room at Presbyterian and arranged for an ambulance.

  The newspapers had a field day with the story of Dorothy’s overdose, even though Dr. Barach tried to minimize the incident by saying it was of so little consequence that he had no plans to visit her in the hospital. His inference that knocking herself out might have been an accident was understandably dismissed, because by this time she had an Olympic-sized track record as an attempted suicide.

  Since she dreaded returning to the Algonquin, she welcomed an offer to convalesce at the country estate of one of her women friends. Every care was lavished upon her. She was coddled twenty-four hours a day and surrounded by so much solicitude, so much harping about her health, that before long she felt suffocated. A few days later she sent friends a martyred telegram: SEND ME A SAW INSIDE A LOAF OF BREAD, and propelled herself back to Manhattan where she resumed her nightly rounds and her drinking.

  The relationship with John had become impossible. After her suicide attempt, he announced to many that he considered it a typical female scheme, staged in the hope that she could tie him to her. He professed to have lost respect for her.

  Not long afterward, they broke off for good. Subsequently McClain made a reputation for himself on the New York Sun with a bylined ship-news column, “The Sun Deck.” In the late 1930s, he went to Hollywood, where he worked as a screenwriter and shared a house with Benchley, who had become a close friend. During the war he served with valor in the Navy, then distinguished himself as drama critic of the New York Journal-American. In 1951 he married for the first time, and when his wife died, he remarried; both marriages were happy. During his last years he suffered from cancer of the mouth and died (just a few weeks before Dorothy) of a liver ailment at the age of sixty-three.

  It was a rough year. The world beyond Tony’s and the Algonquin darkened: In March, there were eighty-six bread lines in New York, one third of the work force was unemployed, and the average family income plunged to sixteen hundred dollars a year. Every week the papers carried stories about people who had lost hope and jumped to their deaths from rooftops or spent their last nickel on razor blades to kill themselves. Everyone seemed to be scared or desperate or suffering in some way, although it was hard to guess the country’s financial deterioration by the way some of Dorothy’s affluent friends continued to frolic. They still rose at the crack of noon to gossip with the manicurists who arrived to do their nails. Dorothy later ridiculed them in a short story, “From the Diary of a New York Lady,” which she pointedly subtitled, “During Days of Horror, Despair, and World Change.”

  Can’t face deciding whether to wear the blue with the white jacket or the purple with the beige roses. Every time I look at those revolting black nails, I want to absolutely yip. I really have the most horrible things happen to me of anybody in the entire world. Damn Miss Rose.

  That winter, to escape the painful memories she now associated with her Algonquin suite, she moved to the Lowell, at 28 East Sixty-third Street, a fairly new residential hotel that had been decorated in the fashionable Art Deco style. Her comfortably furnished flat even had a big easy chair in which she liked to curl up and read, but living there was far beyond her means. It had been nine months since she had done any work for The New Yorker; only once in the past year had she managed to complete a short story, and she was flat broke. She owed money to practically everybody she knew and was obliged to accept alms from many she did not. The Lowell seemed glad to have her as a tenant, perhaps because the publicity offset the drawback of seldom receiving her rent.

  In the months that followed the barbiturate incident, convinced that the two most beautiful words in the English language were “cheque” and “enclosed,” she began to give diligent attention to her shaky financial position. Though difficult to acknowledge, she knew writing poetry did not provide enough revenue to sustain the high life to which she had grown accustomed, and she decided to abandon it, at least for the time being. Harold Guinzburg was eager to publish a second volume of short stories, but she had to write them first, a task that had grown no easier for having been absent from her typewriter for so long. To break through a writer’s block that was proving as deep as the Grand Canyon, she formulated a desperate solution. She asked some of her friends to become duennas; more specifically, they were to park at the Lowell for three or four hours and look busy, with what “I don’t really know, to make me speed up and feel ashamed of myself when I incline to be lazy.” As always, she rewrote so extensively that progress was slow, but she also began to produce some fine work: “Horsie,” “Lady with a Lamp,” “Dusk Before Fireworks,” “Advice to the Little Peyton Girl,” and “Diary of a New York Lady.”

  When she was asked to compose an introduction to a collection of Jim Thurber’s cartoons, The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments, she was delighted to comply. Not only had she taken a fancy to Thurber as a drinking companion, but also she admired his drawings, which she liked to present as Christmas gifts to her friends. In her eyes, his strange men, women, and dogs resembled “unbaked cookies”; she understood them perfectly because they seemed to expect so little from life. Like herself, they were people who “remember the old discouragements and await the new.” Whenever she looked at one of Thurber’s hounds, she went soft with sentiment. Nobody, she decided, could have dreamed up dogs like those unless he felt as she did about animals. The awesome fact was that Thurber actually owned fourteen dogs.

  In mid-July, the Murphys closed Villa America and moved their family to the States, although they continued to spend holidays abroad. After the death of Gerald’s father, the Mark Cross Company had lacked leadership, and he decided to re-enter the family business. After a brief stay in East Hampton, Long Island, and a reunion with Pauline and Ernest Hemingway in Montana, they finally settled down in a Bedford Village, New York, house and a Manhattan apartment. Dorothy continued to ridicule Adele Lovett and other well-off friends, whom she satirized cruelly in “Horsie” and “Diary of a New York Lady,” but she never joked about the Murphys, because she loved them.

  In the meantime, she found herself the object of surprising and unwanted attention. George Oppenheimer, dissatisfied with the publishing business and ambitious to become a writer, had been working on a play whose central character’s personality was modeled on herself. Other characters were supposed to be Robert Benchley and Donald Stewart. At the outset, he had been collaborating with Ruth Goodman, daughter of producer Philip Goodman, but she withdrew from the project leaving him to muddle along on his own. While Dorothy continued to tolerate Oppenheimer, she had few illusions about his skill as a dramatist, did not take kindly to the idea of seeing herself on stage, and strongly suspected that the play would mean more “fresh hell,” all of which proved to be precisely the case. Here Today, bearing the subtitle “A Comedy of Bad Manners,” opened in September with Ruth Gordon playing Dorothy and George Kaufman directing. Dorothy attended opening night with Bennett Cerf. Throughout the performance he noticed her wriggling in the seat, enraged at the stage caricature of herself and muttering threats against Oppenheimer’s life. Afterward, she and Cerf went backstage, where she threw her arms around the playwright and assured him she had enjoyed the play.

  “Oh, you caught me so perfectly!” she declared. “It was absolutely wonderful! How did you do it?”

  Here Today mercifully ran only five weeks, although it would remain a favorite with summer stock companies for the next twenty-five years.

  Here Today was the least of her concerns. Robinson had been attacked by a large dog and injured so seriously that it had been necessary to hospitalize him. She tried to hide her anxiety with jokes. The owner of the other dog refused to take responsibility and even had the temerity to claim that Robinson provoked the attack. Dorothy was indignant. “I have no doubt that he was
also carrying a revolver,” she said vehemently to Aleck Woollcott. As comfort until the dachshund recovered, friends gave her a huge stuffed English sheepdog.

  Robinson failed to pull through, however. Dorothy, who had been exceptionally attached to him, grieved inconsolably. Earlier that year, when Vanity Fair asked her to sit for a full-length portrait by Edward Steichen, she insisted that Robinson must be included in the shot. Steichen photographed her seated in an ornate high-back chair with her hands demurely tucked into a muff. On the floor behind the chair, Robinson was gazing off loftily into the distance, as if the whole business was beneath his dignity. The result was a lovely photograph, one of the very few to show her smiling broadly.

  In the hope of alleviating her bereavement after Robinson’s death, Sara Murphy proposed a trip to Paris. Dorothy, feeling she deserved a vacation, asked Viking Press for a thousand-dollar advance on her next book. At the end of October, the two women sailed on the luxurious Europa, the interior decor of which combined Buckingham Palace, the Munich Hofbrauhaus, and Radio City Music Hall. They would be away for a month.

  Although traveling first class, Dorothy soon began spending time in third. Aboard ship was the mother of Tom Mooney, the West Coast labor leader who had been convicted of a bombing and was serving a twenty-three-year sentence in San Quentin. Dorothy sought her out and learned that she was traveling to Russia with a delegation of American Communists. Mary Mooney, Dorothy decided, had the presence of a queen, or at least the manners that queens ought to have. She was a big, chunky Irish woman, eighty-four years old, wearing a string of shiny green beads and an emerald green scarf over an old wool sweater.

  A few days later, when the Communists announced a meeting in the third-class dining hall, Dorothy took the opportunity to attend. She carefully examined the stocky women with short hair and the serious black men wearing gold-rimmed glasses. They seemed terribly young and earnest, but their speeches about Tom Mooney and others struck her as “much too long and much too muddy and with many—too many—sweeping allusions to the woiking class and the bawss class.” It was their style she found objectionable, not the content of the speeches, with which in fact she was in total agreement. This marked her second exposure to the American Communist Party. The first, during the Sacco-Vanzetti demonstrations five years earlier, had been completely accidental. Aboard the Europa, however, she deliberately went in search of the Party. Even though she found fault with Party rhetoric, her reaction to the meeting was significant. She immediately composed a letter to the New York Sun praising Mary Mooney as “the best person on this ship, and I wish that were higher praise.” The letter, published in the Sun and picked up by other papers throughout the country, left no doubt where Dorothy stood on the subject of Tom Mooney. She believed him innocent.

  In the company of old friends, Dorothy felt happier than she had in months. The first night in Paris, she and Sara had a long dinner with the Murphys’ close friend Dick Myers. For the next three weeks, they did nothing but ramble around the city, attending cocktail parties and teas and dining at Lipp’s and all her favorite restaurants.

  When she arrived home on December 1 a few pounds heavier, she had to admit that she had done absolutely nothing abroad but relax and amuse herself. In merry spirits, she telephoned Frank Adams at his office. “How now, Mr. Pepys, would you like a poem for keeps?” she asked and then proceeded to dictate a poem to him over the phone.

  That fall, Dorothy spent at least four hours a day at her typewriter. Once dusk began to settle, however, she chafed at this hermetic life and began telephoning friends, asking where they were going to be later in the evening. Certain stops were mandatory: Tony’s, “21,” Benchley’s suite at the Hotel Royalton. She was welcome at the Village home of Howard and Betty Dietz or at Polly Adler’s or in the clubs in Harlem—everywhere—regardless of her condition. “She and Fanny Brice, they were the queens of the town,” recalled Ruth Goodman Goetz. “They divided New York between them.” One evening Dorothy dropped in at a cocktail party hosted by producer Courtney Burr, who was starting rehearsals for a Bea Lillie revue, as yet untitled. He hoped one of the forty or fifty guests he had invited might come up with something clever.

  Dorothy walked in late and tight. She was dressed to kill in a black Lanvin gown, feathered cloche, and opera-length gloves and smelled like the ground-floor perfume department at Bergdorf’s. When Burr introduced her to one of the show’s authors, she shifted to automatic pilot and began to ladle compliments upon the writer comparing him to Congreve, Oscar Wilde, and Noel Coward. A native of Providence, Rhode Island, Sidney J. Perelman had worked for the Marx Brothers on Monkey Business and Horse Feathers but was still struggling to establish a firm toehold in the theater. Twenty-eight, of medium height with blue eyes and wire-rimmed glasses, he was married to Laura West, the sister of another aspiring writer, Nathanael West, who currently was employed as the manager of the Hotel Sutton. Sid Perelman later wrote that “Dorothy Parker was already a legend when I first met her in the autumn of 1932.”

  When Courtney Burr asked the assembled guests to think of a good name for his revue, all eyes naturally swiveled to Dorothy, who suggested Sing High, Sing Low. But no, wait a minute, she added, that wasn’t sparkling enough. How about Pousse-Café? There were approving nods and murmurs of “oh, I love it” and “just darling,” but when Dorothy glanced around she noticed Perelman looking glum.

  “What do you think of Pousse-Café, Mr. Perelman?” she asked.

  Perelman, with enthusiasm that was clearly feigned, pronounced her title “great” but wondered if it really carried enough punch. When Dorothy countered with Aces Up, he called her suggestion “marvellous” but continued to look doubtful.

  “I just wonder, though,” he said, “if we can’t find something a tiny bit sharper, less static ...”

  “Well, goodness me,” she said, spraying him with a smile. “What ever shall we do? Our wrist has been slapped by the house genius there, who feels that we’re a bit dull-witted. Of course, he’s in a position to know, isn’t he, leaning down from Parnassus—”

  By this time, some of the guests had begun drifting uneasily toward the door, and a nervous Burr was trying to switch Dorothy off, decharge the atmosphere, and get his party moving again, to no avail. She was just warming up. Perelman made his escape, vowing that if he ever again ran into Dorothy Parker, legend or no legend, “I’d skewer her with one of her own hatpins.”

  The next day, sober and remorseful, Dorothy was stricken to recall dimly that she had been rude to Perelman. She lost no time in sending him a dozen of the most expensive roses she could buy with a note of abject apology. Courtney Burr’s untitled show was eventually christened, by someone other than Dorothy, Walk a Little Faster, and it ran 119 performances. The friendship between Dorothy and Sid Perelman survived for thirty-five years.

  Chapter 12

  YOU MIGHT AS WELL LIVE

  1933-1935

  It looked as if her sex life had died. Since she and John McClain had parted, she had “put sex carefully away on the highest cupboard-shelf, in a box marked ‘Winter Hats—1916.’ ” Not that there weren’t plenty of ravishing men around, most of them willowy young actors who were thrilled to escort her wherever she wished to go and to see that she got back to the Lowell and tucked safely into bed if she passed out. If they had no interest in sleeping with women it made no difference because, as she often said, she needed good fairies to protect her. One night, she was invited to a costume ball where all the divine young men were dressed up to look like divine young women. Lubricated by several highballs, Dorothy observed the dancers from a balcony, but every so often she leaned over the railing and looked down at the dance floor, muttering in despair. Water, water everywhere and not a single drop to drink. When she could contain herself no longer, she shouted, “Come on up, anybody. I’m a man!”

  That August she turned forty. On the night of her birthday she walked into Tony’s with her head defiantly armored in a football helmet,
a gift from Adele Lovett’s husband. In the distance loomed all the birthdays to come, the unfolding of solitary years, until she felt like a prisoner trapped in a cage of her own construction.

  Long I fought the driving lists,

  Plume a-stream and armor clanging;

  Link on link, between my wrists,

  Now my heavy freedom’s hanging.

  During the spring, she met Alan Campbell at Tony’s one night. Benchley introduced them, although Alan was not a friend of his. Alan Campbell was a personable young actor, who had published a few stories in The New Yorker and whom Benchley knew only well enough to say hello and how are you. A few months later, Dorothy ran into him again at Howard Dietz’s house, and she was surprised to learn they had other mutual friends. She was immediately impressed by Alan’s golden good looks, the fine bone structure, the fair hair and dazzling smile that made it seem as if he had just stepped indoors on a June day. He resembled Scott Fitzgerald when Scott had been young and healthy, before he began drinking heavily, and some people thought him far better looking. Alan, like Scott, had a face that was a touch too pretty for a man, the kind of features that caused people to remark he would have made a splendid woman. He was typecast by producers as a classic juvenile. His looks projected the image of a stunning man clad in a blazer, carrying a racquet, bursting through the doors of a stage drawing room, asking, “Tennis, anyone?” That cliché could have been written for Alan. His only physical flaw was a habit of chewing his nails.