Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  Although Alan’s wit was not in the same class as Dorothy’s, his conversation was rarely dull. He had an engaging sense of humor and a highly developed idea of fun. One evening when they were drinking in a Village bar, another customer, whose appearance was decidedly effeminate, began to interrogate Dorothy about her literary tastes. Did she prefer this author or that author? Did she ever read fairy tales?

  “My dear,” she replied, “let us not talk shop.”

  Alan laughed so hard he almost fell on the floor. Later that evening, still feeling merry, he suggested that they have themselves tattooed. They had themselves decorated at one of the Bowery tattoo parlors with matching blue stars in the insides of their upper arms. Afterward, Dorothy complained that she would be condemned to wearing long sleeves for the rest of her life.

  After Dorothy’s tattoo was revealed in a gossip column, the New York Daily Mirror dispatched a reporter to find out where it was located. Sheilah Graham, a young Englishwoman, arrived to find Dorothy having cocktails with Alan and John O’Hara. Shyly, Dorothy pushed up the sleeve of her dress to show Graham her arm and apologized for the boring location of the star. It was so tiny that Graham had trouble distinguishing the design. Dorothy offered Graham a drink, said she liked her, and assured her they would become close friends. She urged her to call again, an invitation Graham took seriously. After she had stopped by several times, always informed that Mrs. Parker was out, she realized that Dorothy had been making a fool of her.

  1) Twelve-year-old Dorothy Rothschild at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Riverside Park, January 1906. (HELEN IVESON. ROBERT IVESON. MARGARET DROSTE. SUSAN COTTON)

  2) A Sunday outing in Riverside Park, 1906. Dorothy poses with brother Bert, her dog Rags, sister Helen, and sister-in-law Mate. Absent is oldest brother Harry, who would subsequently cut himself off entirely from the family. (HELEN IVESON. ROBERT IVESON. MARGARET DROSTE SUSAN COTTON)

  3) A widowed J. Henry Rothschild in 1899, six months after the death of his wife Eliza. Radiating prosperity and his customary confidence, he was known in the garment industry as “the greatest salesman of them all” (Creraud’s Cloak Journal). (HELEN IVESON. ROBERT IVESON, MARGARET DROSTE. SUSAN COTTON)

  4) A boyish Edwin Pond Parker II, nicknamed “Spook” by friends in the 33rd Ambulance Company, because hangovers made him look pale as a ghost, in 1917. Already dependent on alcohol, Eddie (second from left, top row) became further scarred by his war experiences in France and turned to another means of escape when liquor was not available. “Unfortunately,” Dorothy said, “they had dope in the ambulance” (Esquire). (SOURCE: UNKNOWN).

  5) Dorothy and her husband, photographed by Robert Sherwood in October 1919, after Eddie’s return from the war. His features have coarsened, he is struggling with morphine addiction, and to Dorothy, who felt she had been married “for about five minutes,” he had become practically a total stranger. (COURTESY OF THE BOSTON UNIVERSTY LlBRAIRIES)

  6) Dorothy and Robert Benchley pose demurely with their employers in 1919: Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield, Vogue editor Edna Chase, and publisher Condé Nast. Dorothy and Robert Sherwood, behind the camera, would soon be, dismissed, and Benchley would resign in sympathy. “It was the greatest act of friendship I’d known” (Paris Review). (COURTESY OF THE BOSTON UNIVERSITY LIBRAIRIES)

  7) Two revealing portraits of Dorothy in the early twenties: In 1921 (above) she still looks like a vulnerable, naive adolescent, but in Neysa McMein’s 1923 oil painting (left) her face has aged and her expression has grown tense. In the interval between the two portraits, she separated from Eddie, had an affair with Charles MacArthur complicated by pregnancy and abortion, and attempted suicide by slashing her wrists. Alcohol was becoming a problem. (ABOVE. COURTESY OF SAM

  SCHAEFLER; LEFT, COURTESY OF CULVER PICTURES).

  8) Charles MacArthur and Dorothy with Arthur Samuels, a wigless Harpo Marx, and an unusually thin Alexander Woollcott, 1924, probably partying at one of the Long Island mansions where they liked to spend weekends. (SUSAN MARX).

  9) Dorothy sunbathing in Miami Beach, January 1924. The rest of the group includes Ray Goetz. William Emmerich. Neysa McMein, and Irving Berlin. (NEW YORK NEWS. INC.)

  10) Painting of the Round Tablers and friends playing poker was commissioned by Paul Hyde Bonner. Seated counterclockwise around the table are Dorothy, Franklin P. Adams, Henry Wise Miller, Gerald Brooks, Raoul Fleischmann, George Kaufman, Paul Hyde Bonner, Harpo Marx, Alexander Woollcott, and Heywood Broun. Standing arc Robert Bcnehley, Irving Berlin, Harold Ross, Beatrice Kaufman, Alice Duer Miller, Herbert Bayard Swope, George Backer, Joyce Barbour, and Crosby Gaige. (PAUL BONNER, JR.)

  11) Singing “The Internationale” on Beacon Street, Boston, during a demonstration to protest the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, August 10, 1927. Marching ahead of Dorothy in her embroidered dress and white gloves is John Dos Passos. Minutes after the picture was taken, she was arrested. Next morning she pleaded guilty to a charge of loitering and sauntering and paid a five-dollar fine.

  12) Dorothy dressed for an evening on the town around the time she fell in love with John Garrett and divorced Eddie Parker. Snapshot was taken by Heywood Broun’s assistant, Mildred Gilman, during a typical evening of partying and making rounds of the speakeasies,. (MILDRED GILMAN WOHLFORTH)

  13) Dorothy and Robert Benchley (at right) were guests of the Murphy family at Cap d’Antibes in June 1929. Standing by the cabana with towels are Honoria and Gerald Murphy. Dorothy swam two kilometers a day and worked diligently on a novel. “Dear God,” she prayed, “please make me stop writing like a woman. For Jesus Christ’s sake, amen.” (PROPERLY OF MR. AND MRS. WILLIAM M. DONNELLY)

  14) Dorothy in Montana-Vermala, Switzerland, late 1929, where she had accompanied the Murphy family after their son Patrick developed tuberculosis. Although the atmosphere of death in the sanatorium town depressed Dorothy, her sympathy for Sara and Gerald’s agony kept her with them off and on for more than a year. To cheer herself up she bought a Dandie Dinmont terrier and derived pleasure from characterising Switzerland as “the home of horseshit.” (PROPERTY OF MR. AND MRS. WILLIAM M. DONNELLY)

  15) New York Sun reporter John McClain, described by a friend as resembling a male Rubens, with Dorothy during their affair in 1931. (BRENDAN GILL)

  16) Dorothy and her dachshund, Robinson. During the early thirties she was one of the two most socially sought after women in New York (the other was Fanny Brice). On her nightly rounds of parties and speakeasies, Dorothy was usually accompanied by Robinson, who slept elegantly curled up beneath her chair. (HELEN IVESON, ROBERT IVESON, MARGARET DROSTE, SUSAN COTTON)

  17) Thirteen-year-old Alan Campbell on the boardwalk in Atlantic City with his mother, Horte Campbell, and aunt Beulah Eichel. Across the face of the photograph Alan printed We are pushed for money. (AUTHOR COLLECTION) 17

  18) Alan Campbell and a radiant, girlish Dorothy shortly after their marriage in 1934. The newlyweds had recently arrived in Hollywood to become a screen-writing team at Paramount Pictures. (COURTESY OF PARAMONT PICTURES CORPORATION)

  19 Dorothy and Alan arriving in New York on the Champlain, October 1937, after returning from the Spanish Civil War. Horrified by her observations in Valencia and Madrid, Dorothy promptly volunteered her services to aid Spanish children. (WIDE WORLD PHOTOS)

  20) Dorothy and Lillian Hellman with Fernando De Los Rios, Spanish Republic ambassador to the United States, at a luncheon to benefit homeless children in December 1937. As a passionate supporter of the Loyalists, Dorothy helped to raise an estimated $1.5 million for refugees from Franco. (CULVER PICTURES)

  21) At Marc Connelly’s Hollywood house in the late thirties, Dorothy is shown chatting with William Faulkner (standing), Faulkner’s woman friend, Meta Carpenter Wilde, and his agent, Ben Wasson. Faulkner, unlike Dorothy, did not allow his screen-writing work to interfere with his fiction. (COURTESY OF THE DRAMATISTS GUILD FlND)

  22) Dorothy and Alan enjoying cockt
ails at the Café Deux Magots in July 1939. That summer Paris was congested with American tourists eager to party and spend money, even though their sleep was broken by the drone of German planes circling overhead. World War II began on September 1. (COURTESY OF JOHN DAVIES)

  23) Dorothy next to Dashiell Hammett, applauding a speaker at a meeting in Hollywood, late 1930s. Hammett’s aversion toward her increased until he refused to stay under the same roof. (COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF LILLIAN HELLMAN)

  24) Dorothy seated between Laura Perelman and her sister Helen in Hollywood., 1943. Dorothy proudly cunducted Helen on a tour of the movie capital and introduced her to stars such as Marlene Dietrich. “Everyone makes a swell fuss over Dot,” Helen wrote to her son. (HELEN IVESON, ROBERT IVESON, MARGARET DROSTE, SUSAN COTTON)

  25) Dorothy and Alan’s second wedding, August 17, 1950, in Hollywood. Dorothy explained the remarriage by telling wedding guests, “What are you going to do when you love the son of a bitch?” The marriage, however, failed to last even a year. (WIDE WORLD PHOTOS)

  26) Dorothy and Alan with Donald Ogden Stewart at Los Angeles Airport in the late 1930s, before embarking on one of their frequent cross-country air trips between Hollywood and their farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Dorothy is carrying her ever-present knitting bag. (DONALD OGDEN STEWART, JR.)

  27) Alan and Dorothy reunited after an eleven-year separation, outside Alan’s bungalow in Norma Place, Hollywood, 1962. He is behind the wheel of his new green Jaguar, confidently purchased in the hope that a script slated for Marilyn Monroe would lead to a rebirth of their career as a screen-writing team. (PAUL MILLARD)

  28) A grinning Dorothy, holding her poodle Cliché, after deciding to remain with Alan in Hollywood, June 1962. On the table are heaped review copics that she received for her monthly book column in Esquire, a task that became increasingly difficult to carry out. Unemployment insurance—and the sale of review copies—helped support them during lean times. (© 1962 LOS ANGELES TIMES)

  That summer Alan was offered a job playing juveniles with the Elitch Gardens stock company in Denver, which meant a separation of several months. Dorothy decided to go along with him; they could rent an apartment together, and she could write while he was busy at the theater. Alan insisted that it would be a wise move to buy a secondhand car and motor across the country. He promised the trip would take only four days, and Dorothy began to dream of their romantic progress toward the western sun, riding through fields of windswept grain. Among those who saw them off on the morning of June 8 was Marc Connelly, who recalled that their car, a 1929 Ford that resembled a sitz bath, “was the most goddamnedest most-loaded vehicle you ever saw. There was more junk in it, completely unnecessary stuff,” not to mention the two Bedlingtons. When they reached Newcastle, Pennsylvania, Dorothy stopped to telegraph the Murphys, who were sailing for Europe the next day.

  THIS IS TO REPORT ARRIVAL IN NEWCASTLE OF FIRST BEDLINGTON TERRIERS TO CROSS CONTINENT IN OPEN FORD. MANY NATIVES NOTE RESEMBLANCE TO SHEEP. COULDN’T SAY GOODBYE AND CAN’T NOW

  BUT GOOD LUCK DARLING MURPHYS AND PLEASE HURRY BACK. WITH ALL LOVE, DOROTHY.

  The trip west delighted Dorothy. She decided that the finest people who existed operated filling stations and that most Americans west of Pennsylvania lived entirely on catsup. Wolf sat on her lap the whole trip; Cora annoyed Alan. On the fourth day, having just crossed the Nebraska-Colorado state line, they decided it would be fun to wire Don Stewart in Hollywood:

  WE ARE IN JULESBURG, COLORADO, IN OPEN 1929 FLIVVER WITH TWO BEDLINGTON TERRIERS. PLEASE ADVISE.

  Stewart had no suggestions and replied,I HAVE NEVER BEEN IN JULESBURG, COLORADO.

  Arriving at Elitch Gardens, they stepped into more “fresh hell.” The telegram to Stewart had been signed with both their names and apparently he showed it to a Hollywood journalist. “We got out of the car into a swirl of reporters, camera men, sports writers, and members of the printers’ union,” Dorothy recalled. They naively assumed they would be able to live together as in New York but immediately realized their mistake. “Eyebrows,” Connelly said, “shot up to the tops of the cathedrals. I don’t know why they expected to go out to Denver and get away with having an affair.” When they heard phrases like “living in sin,” they both lost their heads. Before Dorothy could stop him, Alan’s southern chivalry had bounded to the forefront, and he boldly declared that they were married, lies that led to further lies because naturally the reporters then wanted details about where and when. Improvising, Alan said the wedding had taken place last October by a justice of the peace in Westbury, Long Island. Dorothy told other reporters that the ceremony had been performed at her sister’s house in Garden City. When the wire services searched the vital statistics of North Hempstead Township, they could find no registry of the marriage, nor had the municipal clerk issued a marriage license. When they called Helen’s home, Victor Grimwood said it was news to him, in fact he was quite sure no ceremony had been performed at his house.

  There seemed to be only one way to save face. A few days later, on the evening of June 18, they drove across the state line to Raton, New Mexico. It was nearly midnight by the time they located a justice of the peace. In an effort to conceal the marriage, Dorothy gave her name as Dorothy Rothschild, age forty, and Alan said he was Allen [sic] Campbell, age thirty-two (he was only thirty). The next day, back in Denver, Dorothy sent her sister a wire from one of the dogs:COMMUNICATION HAS BEEN IMPOSSIBLE IN APPALLING CONFUSION. BUT MANAGED UNANNOUNCED DRIVE TO NEW MEXICO YESTERDAY WHERE PARENTS DIFFICULTIES PRIVATELY SETTLED, IT IS HOPED FOR ALL TIME. BOTH VERY HAPPY. BEST LOVE AND MOTHER IS WRITING.

  She signed the telegram CORA. A wire-service photograph snapped the day before their marriage reveals that they were in fact very happy. Dorothy, trim, radiant, and looking closer to thirty than forty, wore a dress printed all over with daisies and seemed like an adorable Japanese doll next to Alan, who was beaming as usual.

  Still, reporters continued to trail them. Dorothy began to feel persecuted. “Oh, this is the first real happiness I’ve had in my whole life,” she cried. “Why can’t they let us alone?” Her attorney, Morris Ernst, advised showing the marriage certificate but keeping well concealed the date or place it was issued, which she did. While she was at it, she threatened to bring a fifty-thousand-dollar libel suit against the New York Post for suggesting she had lied about having been married the previous autumn.

  Otherwise she was, as she wrote in an ebullient letter to Aleck Woollcott, “in a sort of coma of happiness.” Being Alan’s wife was “lovelier than I ever knew anything could be.” She also felt rapturous about her new status as a wife. When she heard from Scott Fitzgerald in early July, she wired him back:DEAR SCOTT THEY JUST FORWARDED YOUR WIRE BUT LOOK WHERE

  I AM AND ALL MARRIED TO ALAN CAMPBELL AND EVERYTHING ALAN PLAYING STOCK HERE FOR SUMMER.

  She sent him deepest love from both of them.

  It was one of the happiest summers of her life. For only fifty-five dollars a month they leased a furnished bungalow at 3783 Meade Street, which Dorothy named “Repent-at-Leisure.” For the first week or so, they attempted to keep house for themselves. Alan did the cooking and put tomatoes in every dish he prepared, while Dorothy’s contribution to housekeeping was a botched effort to make the bed. She offered to help in the kitchen but failed sublimely. Alan ordered her to stay out. Once rehearsals started, the system broke down, and they had to seek help from an employment agency. They needed, Alan stated, a man who would market, cook, serve, clean, and keep the cigarette boxes filled. A man was preferred because, in their experience, maids tended to chatter, and it was essential for any servant of theirs to observe silence. His wife, he explained to the agency, must never be disturbed: She wrote.

  During the first week, the newlyweds hired and fired three servants, one of whom turned out to be a nonstop talker. Dorothy disliked him so passionately that she was inspired to write a short story about him, “Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street,” which was probab
ly the quickest story she had ever written. It appeared in the August 4 issue of The New Yorker. They finally retained a housekeeper, who insisted on calling Dorothy “honey” and who was genteelly fond of her liquor.

  As for Dorothy, she was drinking less. Blaming the altitude, she explained that “two cocktails and you spin on your ass,” but she also felt happy and relaxed. Expecting to hate Denver, she confessed that “I love it. I love it. I love being a juvenile’s bride and living in a bungalow and pinching dead leaves off the rose bushes. I will be God damned.” Ensconced in the little bungalow, she did nothing but eat, sleep, and knit socks for Alan. Some days she saw little of him because he was in rehearsal, then performed at night, including Sunday. Dorothy was fanatical about staying away from Elitch Gardens; she had once read in a movie magazine that Hollywood respected Clark Gable’s wife for staying out of her husband’s business. Probably this was a wise decision on Dorothy’s part because she had taken to making wildly slanderous observations about the company’s leading lady, telling Alan that she looked like “a two-dollar whore who once commanded five.”