Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  He was twenty-nine, eleven years Dorothy’s junior. While he never actually lied about his background, some people got the idea that his father had been a wealthy Virginia tobacco man, and he could not bring himself to correct the mistake. His real background was similar to Dorothy’s, a mixture of Jewish and Gentile. In Alan’s case, his father was of Scottish descent. His mother’s family, the Eichels, were Jewish emigrés from the Alsace region of France who fought in the Civil War and afterward settled in Richmond, Virginia, where Alan’s grandfather was known to be the finest butcher in the city.

  When Alan’s mother, Hortense, was eighteen, she eloped with Harry Lee Campbell, a six-foot-tall Baptist who worked for a company that sold leaf tobacco. He was reputedly a drinking man. For much of their fifteen-year marriage, they alternated living with their families. When Alan was born in 1904, they were staying at the spacious Eichel house on East Clay Street. It was an unhappy marriage. Clara Lester, who cooked for the Eichel family, remembered Horte’s restlessness. “She’d pick up and go off, and nobody knew where. Anybody goin’ anywhere would say to Horte, ‘You goin’ my way?’ and off she’d go. Her husband was jealous and he drank.” After the Campbells divorced, Horte and Alan continued to live with Horte’s family.

  Alan’s mother, who worked as a clerk at the Internal Revenue Service, never remarried. Content to raise her beautiful son, Horte made him the center of her existence and devoted herself to obtaining the very best for him: dancing classes, scholarships to a prep school, summer camps patronized by Richmond’s elite families, and an education at Virginia Military Institute, where he became one of the most popular boys in his class. Although Alan majored in civil engineering, he also revealed a definite talent for the artistic. His writings and drawings appeared regularly in campus publications and he played the leading feminine parts in dramatic club productions. J. Clifford Miller, Jr., who was three years behind Alan at VMI, recalled that in one play he “was dressed in an evening gown and was so well made-up that in spite of his very obvious arm and leg muscles, he got a lot of whistles from the cadets when he appeared as a very pretty young lady.” For two years after graduation, he lived at home and worked for the state highway department. Roy Eichel remembered his nephew’s unhappiness:All at once, one night, without saying a word to anybody, he disappeared. Later we figured out that when nobody was looking he had packed a suitcase, which he lowered out of his bedroom window on a rope during the night. Then he walked down the stairs to the backyard, picked up the suitcase, and went off to the station where he caught a train for New York. Of course Miz Campbell carried on like a lunatic.

  A few weeks later, finally learning of his whereabouts, Horte dispatched Roy to New York on a special mission to bring her son home. Alan, determined to become an actor, refused.

  His first theater job was in the Schubert costume department, but he soon got small parts with Eva Le Gallienne’s repertory company. In 1928, he played Laurette Taylor’s son in The Furies. By the time he met Dorothy he had appeared in a dozen Broadway shows, including the hit musical Show Boat and Noel Coward’s Design for Living with the Lunts. Alan also began to write and sell fiction, mostly about the theater, which was the subject of many of his New Yorker stories.

  From the start, Dorothy and Alan were extremely taken with each other. He said years later that she was “the only woman I ever knew whose mind was completely attuned to mine.” They were very much alike, not only in their Jewish-Gentile backgrounds, but in their likes and dislikes, their fears, and their critical judgments. “No one in the world has made me laugh as much as Dottie,” he said. He could never predict when or where she would open her mouth and quietly utter five or six priceless words. One evening at the home of Dorothy and Richard Rodgers, dinner guests were happily and lengthily denigrating Clare Boothe. Her sole defender at the table was Uka Chase, who protested that Clare was always loyal to friends. Moreover, added Chase, Clare was always kind to her inferiors.

  “And where does she find them?” asked Dorothy, without looking up from her plate or missing a bite.

  Quite apart from his uncritical appreciation of her wit, it was obvious to him that she needed someone to look after her. The disorderly way she lived was deplorable, but Alan took it for granted that a writer of her stature should be ignorant of cooking, shopping, and keeping her bank account in order, indeed coping with any mundane matter. He was quick to notice every detail of her appearance and to make tactful suggestions for improvement. Even though she had excellent taste in clothing, her grooming was occasionally less than impeccable. Alan felt strongly that a woman in her position should look elegant, and he was going to make sure she did. Not only did he supervise dieting and shopping for a new wardrobe, he redid her makeup and also designed an exceptionally becoming hairstyle—long soft bangs with the rest of her hair sleekly pulled back into a twist. She liked the style so much that she kept it for the rest of her life. Alan was, said Ruth Goodman Goetz, “your instantaneous, quick-witted interior decorator. Alan bought her clothes, fussed with her hairstyle and her perfume. I don’t know if he actually set her hair or not, but he may have. Dottie was delighted to have this handsome creature around.”

  Meanwhile, she was suffering from serious problems that seemed incapable of solution by anything as simple as a new coiffure. Sunk deep in one of the moods that she called “a Scotch mist,” she drank heavily and sometimes had blackouts. Writer Joseph Bryan III, a childhood friend of Alan’s from Richmond, remembered running into him at a dance.

  “Come along at once,” Alan said. “Dottie Parker is here and she’s dying to meet you.”

  Bryan followed him to the edge of the dance floor, where Dorothy was holding court on a gilt chair. To his amazement and delight, she seemed thrilled to see him, complimented him extravagantly on a recent New Yorker profile, and insisted he take a seat next to her. After a time, she wondered whether he might be interested in collaborating on a play with her—he said he would be—and wanted to know how soon he could start. When they agreed to meet the next morning, Bryan left the dance floating on a pink cloud. Next day, on the stroke of eleven, he appeared at her hotel and asked the doorman to ring her.She was a long time answering, but finally he said, “Mr. Bryan, madam ... Mr. Bryan.... He turned to me: “Will you spell it, sir?” I spelled it, and he repeated, “B, R, Y, A, N, madam.... Yes, madam.” He turned to me again: “Mrs. Parker asks what you wish to see her about.” I don’t know how I made myself heard over the noise of my heart cracking, but I must have succeeded, because presently I found myself in the elevator, even though I was already achingly aware that she’d have no recollection of our glittering plans from the evening before. It proved to be worse than that: she had no recollection even of our having met.

  I saw Dottie many, many times afterwards... but never once was that first evening ever mentioned. For all that she retained of it, it had never happened.

  A few weeks later, another embarrassing incident occurred. Dorothy had agreed to support Fiorello La Guardia’s candidacy for mayor of New York City. At a press conference arranged by Beatrice Kaufman, a horde of reporters arrived at Dorothy’s apartment and began to interrogate her about politics. One of the better political jokes of the year had been hers: When Benchley brought her the news that Calvin Coolidge was dead, she responded, “How can they tell?”

  Firsthand witnesses claimed that Benchley shot back, “He had an erection.” But the punch line was generally omitted in deference to Benchley’s image as a one-hundred-percent clean-cut family man.

  On the afternoon of the La Guardia press conference, crouched in a chair, Dorothy was either drunk or hung over. She refused to talk about La Guardia, or any other subject, and declared that “I’m having a filthy time.” Reluctant to acknowledge that she had never voted, she said that maybe she once had voted for a surrogate judge but could no longer remember. When asked about the election, she replied, “Maybe we’d better have another round of drinks. I’ll tell Ivy,” and added angrily,
“This is not going so well, I feel miserable.”

  The Viking Press was preparing to issue her second volume of collected fiction. The original title, The Infernal Grove, had been discarded and donated to John O’Hara, who also finally vetoed it in favor of Appointment in Samarra for his first novel. Dorothy’s book finally appeared as After Such Pleasures from John Donne’s “Farewell to Love.” Viking reprinted several of her best stories (“Horsie,” “Dusk Before Fireworks”), some of her earliest work (“Too Bad,” written in 1923) and popular soliloquies such as “The Waltz.” An excited Edmund Wilson recommended the book to Louise Bogan: “You should read it, if you haven’t—I’ll send you my borrowed copy, if you promise to send it back.” Wilson’s praise was typical of the critical reaction, which should have delighted Dorothy, but the pleasures of success were overcast by the debilitation that always accompanied a “Scotch mist.”

  Prohibition was repealed. After thirteen years, the sale of alcohol became legal again on December 5, 1933, and the speakeasy era, in which Dorothy learned to drink, would soon fade to a memory. Even though Prohibition had never interfered with her drinking—quite the opposite—she enjoyed the new freedom, particularly in Alan’s company, as they made the rounds of her favorite saloons. One night they were drinking at Tony’s when their voices began to rise. Alan got up and angrily stamped out. Dorothy, left fingering the silverware, looked around and smiled at the people sitting nearby. “I don’t know why he should get so angry,” she said to Emily Hahn, “just because I called him a fawn’s ass.”

  Ordinarily, Alan did not react to such provocative remarks. Having grown up with drinking parents, he instinctively understood that in these situations somebody had to be responsible and usually it was himself. He knew what Dorothy badly needed was somebody to take charge, and Alan took great pleasure in being a manager. On a practical level, he endeared himself by sobering her up, making excuses, and getting her out of jams whenever necessary. There were some problems about which he could do nothing but shake his head in astonishment, however. By this time, her debts had grown so sizable that it seemed she could never repay them if she lived to be a hundred. Her method of handling money and debt was careless. She disposed of her earnings by reckless spending until nothing was left and then panicking, at which point she would shoot off an apologetic telegram to Viking, asking that five hundred dollars be deposited in National City Bank.

  Part of her financial distress was due to generosity. She was quick to give away money to any friend who needed it. When John O’Hara faced a domestic crisis and required fifty dollars in a hurry, she wrote a check and ordered him never to mention the matter again, because she was so deeply in debt that fifty dollars made no difference. She also helped her sister, who was working as a salesclerk at Gimbel’s. George Droste died in 1932, and Helen recently married Victor Grimwood, a retired schoolteacher in his sixties and a sportsman who was the author of a book on fly fishing. Sometimes the Grimwoods were hard up. Dorothy agreed to cosign a bank loan for Victor, a kindness that did not prevent her from complaining about him behind his back. The members of her family, she grumbled, “seem to have retired from active work of any kind. That is, all except my brother-in-law, who has a dandy business. He makes ships’ models. Of course, it’s a little dull at the moment, but it’ll come back.”

  Attracting a man as young as Alan pleased Dorothy, but she also felt extremely sensitive about the difference in their ages. For the most part, she carried off the situation by never mentioning Alan’s true age and pretending he was merely a few years her junior. Only among her closest friends did she joke about it. When Howard Dietz once needled her about Alan being too straitlaced for her, she agreed but wondered what could be done about it. “Oh yes,” she said, “we could send him to military school.” Instead of dwelling on his youth, she preferred to emphasize the fact that he was a Southerner and affectionately began referring to him as “the Colonel.”

  Dorothy went out of her way to help the Colonel. In January 1934, presumably as a result of introducing him to her close friends Ellen and Philip Barry, Alan was cast in Barry’s new play, The Joyous Season. That same month Dorothy made up her mind to leave the Lowell and moved into an apartment building at 444 East Fifty-second Street, which afforded an unbroken view of the garbage in the East River and was located, as she said, “far enough east to plant tea.” At first she found the new apartment oppressive, but after Philip Barry’s play had closed, the Colonel began spending most of his time there with her. By spring they were more or less living together.

  With a new home and a new lover, it seemed only natural to buy a dog, and she acquired a Bedlington terrier. “I picked him out because Bedlingtons are trained to root up gardens and hunt otters, and my New York apartment was simply infested with otters.” No animal of Dorothy’s was exposed to the concepts of obedience training or housebreaking, and Wolf proved no exception. To compound the problem of owning an untrained puppy, Alan insisted that Wolf should have a friend, and they decided to get a second, fully grown Bedlington, Cora. One night they were at the Murphys’ Beekman Place apartment with John O’Hara, waiting for the arrival of Ernest Hemingway. After four hours, he had not shown up and the Bedlingtons grew restless. So did O’Hara, who felt antagonistic toward Sara because he suspected that she disliked him. As he gleefully reported to Hemingway later, “I had the pleasure of watching first one dog, then another taking a squirt on Mrs. Murphy’s expensive rugs.”

  That spring Dorothy saw a good deal of Scott Fitzgerald, who was living in Baltimore while Zelda underwent treatment at Johns Hopkins. Scott was busy revising Tender Is the Night for an April publication date. Dorothy had not seen him for several years, although the previous fall, she had impulsively written to him, when Ring Lardner had died of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight. She and John O’Hara were sitting over coffee in the Baltimore Dairy Lunch late one night while Dorothy read the latest issue of The New Republic containing Scott’s obituary of Ring. Dorothy could not help weeping. O’Hara irritated her by repeating, “Isn’t it swell?” until she finally told him, “The Gettysburg Address was good too.” Writing in what appears to be crayon, she scrawled a tipsy note to Scott: “I think your piece about Ring is the finest and most moving thing I have ever read,” and she signed it “Dorothy Parker, N.Y. City,” as if she and Scott were complete strangers.

  He telephoned to thank her, but they did not meet again until April, when Zelda’s paintings and drawings were exhibited at a Manhattan art gallery. Dorothy, who attended the exhibition with the Murphys and Adele Lovett, dutifully made several purchases. She paid thirty-five dollars for two watercolors, one of them a portrait of Scott wearing a crown of thorns and the other a dancer who resembled Zelda. She was shocked to find the prices pitifully low. Zelda had talent, she thought, but the painful qualities of the work and the dominating color of blood red upset her. She knew she would never hang the pictures in her apartment.

  During this period, while Zelda was temporarily living at a rest home on the Hudson River, Scott made frequent visits to New York, where he stayed at the Algonquin or the Plaza. His pockets stuffed with catalogs for Zelda’s exhibit, he turned up at Tony’s or telephoned Dorothy, eager to ramble around all night partying and asking for introductions to women. Jim Thurber obliged. Dorothy did not, but she once invited him to join her, John O’Hara, and O’Hara’s former wife, Helen. To O’Hara’s dismay, as they were seeing Helen home, Scott began making passes in the cab, and she did not bother to fight him off. When the taxi pulled up at her door, Scott immediately climbed out and escorted her inside, even though he was so drunk that he needed the doorman’s assistance to walk.

  “He’s awful,” Dorothy protested to O’Hara. “Why didn’t you punch him?”

  O’Hara replied that Helen was entitled to behave as she liked.

  Years later Dorothy confided in a friend that she had slept with Scott, but added that it had been nothing more than a fleeting affair. Since he was an a
lcoholic like herself, she could feel compassion for him, but he made her uncomfortable for the same reason. She despised in him the very qualities she hated in herself—sniveling self-pity, the way they both wasted their talent, their lack of self-discipline. And, like herself, Scott could be tiresome when he was drinking. It is not impossible that they slept with each other once or twice in some unplanned encounter when both of them were drunk. However, given her deepening involvement with Alan at this time, the fact that they were living together and spending most of their time in each other’s company, it seems unlikely that she went out of her way to have affairs.

  Some of her friends wondered what sort of erotic relationship she was having with Alan. Some were pleased to speculate that there was little physical intimacy at all. In order to make such remarks, they had to ignore the obvious, which was that “in addition to their friendship they had a real physical love for each other so strong that it was startling to see,” as one friend said.

  Before meeting Dorothy, Alan’s involvements with the opposite sex had been with older women, with whom he slept or lived and whom he treated like daughters. He’d once, for example, lived with actress Estelle Winwood. Sid Perelman classified Alan as a homosexual, temporarily non-practicing. Other friends tended to agree with Ruth Goetz who said, “All the time I knew Alan I never saw him do anything overtly homosexual. I sensed, however, that somewhere in his past there had been homosexual friendships.”

  Regardless of what people said, it was increasingly clear that Dorothy loved Alan and that he loved her. With her history, her seeming knack for selecting those very men incapable of loving back, this development seemed excellent progress. Marc Connelly was one friend who welcomed Alan. “When Dottie fell in love, she fell in love. She didn’t swim in a fishpond, you know; she went into the ocean. Alan was a nice boy, a good boy. She was very much in love with him, and so he was welcome.”