Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  As new friendships developed, several old ones began to fade as a result of distance, Alan, or death. Soon after Dorothy’s arrival in Hollywood, she was stunned to learn of Ruth Hale’s death. It was hard for her to believe, let alone accept. She greatly respected Ruth, whose stand on many subjects paralleled her own. An important exception was Ruth’s adamant belief that married women should retain their unmarried names. With Jane Grant, she cofounded the Lucy Stone League to encourage women not to change their names. Dorothy, who regarded keeping the name Rothschild with as much distaste as Ruth would have viewed the idea of taking Heywood Broun’s surname, could never personally endorse Ruth’s crusade. To indicate the emotions behind her rejection, she once sent Ruth a telegram that began TO RUTH BROUN FROM DOROTHY ROTHSCHILD.... Despite her opposing viewpoint she could not help feeling angered at the irony of Ruth’s obituary in the Los Angeles Examiner a five-word record that struck her as the total failure of a feminist’s life: EX-WIFE OF HEYWOOD BROUN PASSES.

  All through the year she was gripped by a sense of dislocation. Waves of homesickness for New York came and went and later sent her rocketing from coast to coast. She reminded herself that nice people lived in Hollywood—she thought Bing Crosby was “swell” and James Cagney “the best person”—but nobody made up for the loss of old, dear friends. Each week she made a point of tuning in to Aleck Woollcott’s radio show, The Town Crier. When she heard his voice, she felt “pulled apart by nostalgia” and began to cry. She also missed the Murphys, whose older son, Baoth, suddenly died of spinal meningitis at the age of sixteen.

  The person she missed most was Robert Benchley, which was ironic, since he was living half of each year in Hollywood. She could have seen as much of him as she had in New York. With a successful second career as a film actor, he came to the Coast in April and lived at the Garden of Allah until September or October, when he rushed back home to cover the theater season for The New Yorker. If not for Gertrude and the boys, he might have spent even less time in the East.

  A coolness had developed between Dorothy and Benchley. To a great extent, Alan had usurped Benchley’s role of confidant, comrade, and advisor, but her withdrawal from Benchley predated her marriage. In 1933, Edmund Wilson visited one Sunday afternoon and found her entertaining Bea Stewart and Benchley’s ex-mistress Betty Starbuck. Drinking gin and ginger ale and lounging around in a dowdy dressing gown, she openly ridiculed Benchley for selling out to Hollywood. She also was disgusted by an advertisement for his New York Mirror column that showed a little girl saying, “Oh, goody! here comes the funny man.” Wilson wrote, “They were vomiting and puking over his stuff in the Mirror.”

  In Hollywood, her contacts with Benchley were increasingly limited to social occasions.

  Their plans to return East after clearing her debts seemed to have been postponed and perhaps temporarily forgotten. Indeed, they were settling more firmly in California. In 1935 they moved to 914 North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, a colonial mansion with tall white columns and rolling lawn graced by magnolia and pine trees. Despite Harold Guinzburg’s warnings about the folly of writers who remained in Hollywood year-round, they continued to sign contract renewals and hurtle from film to film: The Case Against Mrs. Ames, Hands Across the Table, and Mary Burns, Fugitive, as well as others Dorothy wished she could assign to oblivion. For three months in the autumn, Paramount loaned them to MGM, where they worked on Suzy, a gold-digger comedy about an American showgirl in London that was to showcase Jean Harlow and Cary Grant.

  By now their joint salary had climbed to fifteen hundred dollars a week. Dorothy may not have taken pride in her work, but she refused to belittle her labors. “Garbage though they turn out, Hollywood writers aren’t writing down. This is their best.” Unfortunately, she was unable to develop the pragmatic attitude held by friends like William Faulkner and Nathanael West, who viewed film writing as a means of underwriting their other work. After a five-and-a-half-day week at the studio, Dorothy found she had little energy left. This was not true of Alan. He wrote three stories for The New Yorker in 1935, but Dorothy produced no fiction or verse, only a five-page introduction to Arthur Kober’s book, Thunder over the Bronx.

  As the months passed, her estrangement from New York continued to deepen. She mourned the unwilling severance of old ties, developed hurt feelings over what she interpreted as neglect by eastern friends, and told herself that New Yorkers had peculiar attitudes about friendship—if you left town for any length of time, they simply figured you were dead. She did not intend to be forgotten and sometimes felt sufficiently provoked to issue a reminder of her existence:Dear Harold [she wrote to Guinzburg],

  This is small business troubles. Look, it seems that Miss Miriam Hopkins ... did some broadcasting while in your New York, and used for her vehicle, the bitch, my “Telephone Call.” I didn’t hear it, because what would I be doing with a radio, but it turns out, from the testimony of kindly friends, that she did it on two occasions. I never knew anything about it—no one ever asked me about using it, let alone any matter of royalties....

  It is doubtful whether she realized that she had referred to her native city as “your New York.” The truth was that the city felt less and less like hers. Two years earlier, in Manhattan, she was quoted as saying that she favored taxes because “rich people should be taxed for being alive.” What she could not yet bring herself to acknowledge was that she was, by any standards, well on her way to becoming one of those despised people.

  Chapter 13

  GOOD FIGHTS

  1936-1937

  All through the middle and late thirties, Dorothy was engaged in feverish warfare, but some observers found it hard to say what side she was on. In the spring of 1936, John O’Hara paid a visit to Hollywood and stayed briefly as a houseguest with Dorothy and Alan, who were living grandly on their fifteen hundred dollars a week. His eyeballs rolled up. “They have,” he recounted peevishly to Scott Fitzgerald,a large white house, Southern style, and live in luxury, including a brand new Picasso, a Packard convertible phaeton, a couple of Negroes, and dinner at the very best Beverly Hills homes. Dottie occasionally voices a great discontent, but I think her aversion to movie-writing is as much lazy as intellectual. She likes the life. She and Alan are with Paramount, writing a courtroom picture for Claudette Colbert. Don Stewart, who is full of shit, has converted himself to radical thought, and goes to all the parties for the Scottsboro boys. His wife, who is more honest and whom I don’t like either, stays home from them.... He is certainly scared about something, and it isn’t only the Revolution. But he is such a horse’s ass that it doesn’t matter much....

  There is no mention of Dorothy’s political activities, most likely because O’Hara was unable or unready to decode the signals he was receiving from his one-time mentor. When Robert Benchley wrote to his wife at the end of April, he too mentioned the new political awareness that was sweeping Hollywood. The Scottsboro case had become a cause célèbre among liberals and Communists. Everybody was eager to organize a screenwriters’ union or join a committee to free the eight black Alabama youths convicted of raping two white girls. “Dottie and Alan,” Benchley added, “are on all committees at once, and seem to be very happy about it.”

  What drew her attention most powerfully was news of the Third Reich’s persecution of Jews. Her ambivalence over her own Jewishness was so great that she would think of herself as a “mongrel” because of her mixed origins to the end of her life. At the same time, she found anti-Semitism terrifying and had begun to take a passionate, emotional interest in what was happening politically in Germany. At a hundred-dollar-a-plate banquet that she co-hosted with Don Stewart and others, she heard a firsthand account of the situation. The dinner speaker was a professional Communist propagandist, although it is unlikely that Dorothy knew anything about Otto Katz’s politics that evening. A native of Prague and a former Berlin journalist, Katz was a suave and extremely persuasive man who spoke five languages and could talk about Kafka as easi
ly as he could about Karl Marx. In 1936, he was acting as chief of staff for the legendary Willi Münzenberg, the German Communist who had escaped the Nazis and established a new headquarters for Comintern propaganda in Paris. Münzenberg is credited with being the first to recognize the advantages to be gained by quietly recruiting the support of eminent intellectuals, cultivating the friendship of these distinguished fellow travelers by subtle means, rarely quite aboveboard. He wooed foreign sympathizers such as Clarence Darrow and André Gide to the Soviet cause. Otto Katz had figured importantly in this work. He also had helped to compile Münzenberg’s Brown Book, an indictment of Hitler that had been translated into twenty-three languages.

  During his visit to Hollywood, Katz avoided expressing himself in Communist terminology, nor did he go out of his way to publicize his association with Münzenberg, whose name probably would have meant nothing to his audience anyway. Although Katz spoke eloquently about the importance of maintaining ties of friendship with the Soviet Union, he presented his primary allegiance as the cause of combatting fascism. Don Stewart recalled that when Katz began to describe the Nazi terror, “the details of which he had been able to collect only through repeatedly risking his own life, I was proud to be sitting beside him, proud to be on his side in the fight.”

  When Otto Katz called for the cooperation of the film colony in fighting Hitler and preventing a second world war, Dorothy saw an opportunity to make herself useful. Together with Stewart, Fredric March, and Oscar Hammerstein II, she helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League to propagandize actively against Hitler. Offices were rented, a weekly newspaper was published, and public meetings were sponsored. Stars, writers, and directors contributed donations, and the studio heads offered enthusiastic support. Don Stewart became the League’s chairman, Alan its secretary, and Dorothy a member of the executive board.

  Several months later, after it was rumored that the League might be a Red organization, some stars dropped out and producers withdrew for fear they were contributing to Communism. By this time, Otto Katz was back on the other side of the Atlantic, his mission successful. Despite the early dropouts, the League continued to thrive and its membership eventually reached some four thousand.

  Dorothy began moving away from people who failed to take the threat of fascism seriously, those who would not be convinced “until they see what has happened.” She turned to another group. The white house on Roxbury Drive soon became the scene of buffet suppers that appeared to be ordinary social functions. At some point in the evening, Dorothy introduced a Marxist lecturer or a trade unionist, sometimes a German refugee, and she urged the need for generous contributions. She gave a dinner to raise money for the defense of the Scottsboro boys. One weekend, she and Alan, along with Don Stewart and a delegation of film writers, were invited to San Francisco for a conference being sponsored by the League of American Writers. This was an openly left-wing affair, whose speakers included Harry Bridges, the Australian-born leader of the International Longshoremen’s Union, and Ella Winter, the widow of Lincoln Steffens. Welcoming the screenwriters, Winter said that the movement needed their spirit and humor. She flattered Dorothy and Don by describing them as people who “in one sentence can help us more than a thousand jargon-filled pamphlets.” Later, she met them at a nearby cocktail lounge and introduced them to Bridges, who promptly won them over with his humor and ability to put away respectable quantities of bourbon. Everyone relaxed and got drunk. The next day the visitors made a trip to San Quentin prison and spoke with Tom Mooney.

  Dorothy had been arrested during the Sacco-Vanzetti demonstrations, but nine years later, with no attempt at concealment on her part, her leftist tendencies still baffled those who knew her well and those who believed they did. If her support on behalf of two anarchists was not taken seriously, neither did she receive respectful attention when she began to speak warningly about Franco and Hitler. To many observers (including some of her most intimate friends), the source of her radicalism was obvious: She was playing amateur revolutionary, just as she once had played amateur suicide. This was nothing but theatrics.

  Even her appearance underwent an evolution. In the days when she had been broke, she had always managed to turn herself out in fine outfits from Valentino and Hattie Carnegie. Since moving to Hollywood, she had hundred-dollar underwear and nightgowns made at an exclusive Beverly Hills shop. Outwardly, however, she began to adopt the proletariat look—a ruffled peasant blouse, baggy dirndl skirt cinched in at the waist, flat-heeled shoes, a babushka wrapping her hair and tied under the chin, so that only the dark bangs stuck out. You didn’t see many women looking like that in Hollywood. There were days when she showed up at Paramount dressed like a Ukrainian farm woman getting ready to climb on a tractor. For that matter, she also bore more than a passing resemblance to those 1890-style sweatshop workers jogging along Hester Street with bundles of shirtwaists riding on their heads. J. Henry Rothschild would have swooned.

  Dorothy declined to explain the reasons for this transformation. As she wrote in New Masses, “I cannot tell you on what day what did what to me,” a statement that shed little light on the subject. She did recount a childhood memory: She and her Aunt Lizzie Rothschild were watching men shovel snow outside the house on West Sixty-eighth Street when Lizzie said that it was nice there had been a blizzard—now the men had work. “And I knew then it was not so nice that men could work for their lives only in desperate weather, that there was no work for them when it was fair.” She also alluded to the Sacco-Vanzetti executions by noting that at certain times of her life, she had felt “wild” with the knowledge of injustice but had not known what to do. It amazed and amused her that she had to come to Hollywood, of all the improbable places, to discover ways of fighting values she had always hated.

  With more generosity than accuracy, she gave credit for her radicalization to Don Stewart, though he corrected this error in his memoirs by observing that she “had ‘gone left’ before I had.” She felt intense rapport with Stewart, who was also losing friends and suffering for his new beliefs. Alan was, according to Budd Schulberg, “a genuine left liberal who had a little trouble stomaching the Party,” but he put aside his own beliefs when they conflicted with his wife’s enthusiasms. This was not true in Stewart’s marriage. Bea objected vigorously to his political activities. As Robert Benchley sympathetically commented, “Don pretty difficult in past two years, all wrapped up in his guilds and leagues and soviets.” In due course, Bea divorced him and married Count Ilya Andreyevich Tolstoy, a grandson of Leo Tolstoy, whom she met in Florida, where he was managing the Marine Aquarium without a dime to his illustrious name. In 1939, Don Stewart married Lincoln Steffens’s widow, Ella Winter. Throughout the thirties and forties he worked on a number of highly successful films, such as The Philadelphia Story, while continuing his political involvements. By 1951, he immigrated to England, blacklisted.

  Dorothy, meanwhile, had begun to divide the world into two camps: those who smiled at her indulgently and the like-minded leftist friends whom she referred to as “my own people.” She preferred the company of her own people, including Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. Her feelings were reflected in a tart remark she made about Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent and a journalist she disliked for his callous attitude toward the Russians: “When the train of history went around a sharp curve, he fell out of the dining car.” In her eyes, history had shoved a great many people out of the dining car. Out of affection and nostalgia, she continued to maintain ties with the Murphys, the Guinzburgs, and Aleck Woollcott, but she dropped people like Adele Lovett. She felt saddest of all about Benchley. At first, eager for his support, she had counted on his understanding because he believed that the new progressive movement was good for Hollywood. He paid twenty dollars to attend a fund-raising dinner on behalf of German-Jewish refugees. Afterward, he complained to Gertrude that such affairs were “all very laudable—but expensive.” As Dorothy kept inching further to the left, she s
oon realized he was not following, but appeared to be increasingly skeptical of her direction.

  A serious break occurred the following year, when she and Benchley both happened to be visiting New York and met for drinks at “21.” Cannoning him with a fusillade of leftist ideology, she espoused her views with such militancy that Benchley was taken aback and greatly angered. He reacted to what probably struck him as political arrogance by launching an indirect counterattack and told her “not to make those ingenue eyes at me,” because she was no longer an ingenue. Writing to Sara and Gerald Murphy about it, he said, “Dottie didn’t mind my views on her labor activities but the ‘ingenue’ line (so I am told) cut her to the quick.” In fact, she objected violently to both. For several months, she refused to answer his phone calls or visit him at the Garden of Allah, until eventually the intercession of friends brought about a reconciliation.

  Benchley’s reference to labor activities meant Dorothy’s fierce belief that screenwriters should be organized. She had been in Hollywood a very short time when she stopped marveling about the fairy-tale salaries studios paid to their writers. She was dismayed to learn that few writers had the credentials to command hundreds of dollars a week and that for every Parker or Loos or Hecht, someone was earning slave wages.I saw some of the most stinkingest practices you’d ever want to see. People—honest, hard workers were thrown out of their jobs, without warning, without justice. People were hired on what is called “spec”—which meant that they wrote without pay, with the understanding that if their work was accepted they would be paid—and then their work would be used, but they would be fired—still without pay. The average wage of a screen writer was forty dollars a week. [Well, that] would have been perfectly corking except that there was a catch to it. The average term of employment was two weeks in a year.