Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  In the summer of 1936, a drive got under way to recruit new members for the Screen Writers Guild, the union that had been formed four years earlier but had encountered violent opposition from the studios, who refused to accord it recognition or bargaining power. Many writers considered unions beneath the professional dignity of so-called artists. Needless to say, Dorothy was not among them, nor did she have sympathy for those who later affiliated themselves with a rival, studio-supported union known as the Screen Playwrights. Expecting studios to represent the rights of writers, she was said to have remarked, “was like trying to get laid in your mother’s house. Somebody was always in the parlor, watching.” At a meeting where a number of well-known writers spoke out against affiliation with the Guild, she was enraged to hear Richard Schayer, a writer who had been in the business for twenty years, insist that “screenwriting is a soft racket.” He saw no reason for writers to gum up the works. “Especially when the Mothership [MGM] objects,” Dorothy retorted. She was furious. For the Screen Guilds’ Magazine she wrote a toxic rebuttal to Schayer and saracastically titled it “To Richard—With Love.”

  I do not feel that I am participating in a soft racket (and what the hell, by the way, is a hard racket?) when I am writing for the screen. Nor do I want to be part of any racket, hard or soft, or three-and-a-half minutes.... I have never in my life been paid so much, either—well, why am I here, and why are you, and why is Mr. Schayer? But I can look my God and my producer—whom I do not, as do many, confuse with each other—in the face, and say that I have earned every cent of it.

  Her anger at writers who “wouldn’t join because they were individuals, they were artists, because it wasn’t genteel, because they were ladies, they were gentlemen” did not abate either. Two years later, when a writer she was trying to persuade to join the Guild said he didn’t believe that creative writers belonged in unions, she saw red. “That sonofabitch telling me that he’s a creative writer! If he’s a creative writer, I’m Marie of Rumania.”

  To those who feared the word union, she wanted to say: “Now, look, baby, ‘union’ is spelled with five letters. It is not a four-letter word.”

  After settling in Hollywood, Dorothy frequently saw Sid and Laura Perelman, who were working as a writing team at Paramount. Disenchanted with the film business, the Perelmans would instantly decamp once they had completed a picture. Dorothy paid careful attention when they began extolling the virtues of the farm they had purchased in Pennsylvania. Judging from their poetic description, Bucks County was an unspoiled stretch of country north of Philadelphia along the Delaware River, a place where the eye beheld vistas on every side that refreshed the soul, a pastoral retreat of covered bridges and stone barns, gently rolling hills, and unpretentious hamlets that might have graced the Cotswolds before the advent of the Industrial Revolution. In other words, it sounded everything that Beverly Hills was not. The Perelmans reported that even though the area had been invaded by artists and writers, property was still relatively inexpensive. There were bargains to be found if one made the effort.

  These delirious references to Bucks County began to intrigue Dorothy. She found herself growing receptive to the idea of trees and grass, vegetation synonymous in her mind with suburban living. Suddenly she was struck by a gloomy thought.

  “We haven’t any roots, Alan,” she said. “You can’t put down roots in Beverly Hills. But look at Laura and Sid—they’ve got roots, a place to come home to. Roots, roots.”

  Alan’s eyes were already misty. As he too warmed to the prospect of becoming a country squire, the interior decorator lurking within came bubbling to the surface. Nothing like their home on North Roxbury Drive would do, nothing that came equipped with washing machines and stainless-steel kitchens. Instead, he visualized a place they could refurbish to suit their tastes, the kind of old house that had character.

  They visited New York in July. It was a slow, sultry journey in a baking-hot compartment. When they reached Kansas, Dorothy wired Sara and Gerald, cheerfully swearing that the next time she crossed the continent by railroad it would be in a coffin covered with an American flag. Once they had checked into the Surrey Hotel, they lost no time in heading to Bucks County to inspect the Perelmans’ rustic paradise for themselves. Sid and Laura introduced them to Jack Boyle, Tinicum township’s resident anarchist and former professional fur thief. He was usually planted on the steps of the post office spinning yarns, but he also peddled real estate in his spare time. Dorothy hit it off with the Irishman at once.

  For the next few days, the Perelmans accompanied the Campbells on a tour of local farms for sale. The second property Boyle showed them turned out to be an extremely handsome Pennsylvania Dutch house in Pipersville. Set back from the main road, reached by a long, scenic lane that guaranteed complete privacy, the fieldstone house sat on 111 acres of land that boasted a panoramic view of the Delaware River valley. Boyle called the place Fox House, named he said for a family who had owned it since the Revolutionary War. Three maples shaded the fourteen-room house on the north side, an apple orchard luxuriated on the south, and about fifty yards away stood an immense stone barn. When Boyle announced an asking price of only forty-five hundred dollars, it seemed past belief and everybody’s eyes widened. Sid Perelman declared that if the Campbells hesitated, he and Laura would certainly scoop up the house themselves.

  Boyle raised a warning hand. They should see the inside of the house first, he told them, because it needed a little work.

  It did indeed. Poultry feathers and cobwebs blanketed the interior. The ceilings dripped plaster stalactites, and the woodwork crumbled beneath their touch. There was no cellar, and what remained of the rotting floors was carpeted with dead chickens—“not still corpses, not yet skeletons,” Dorothy recalled. Most incredible of all, people were actually living there, an elderly Lithuanian couple who had established a rent-free colony a number of years ago and had been eking out a living cultivating a few fields and raising chickens. They did not welcome the appearance of potential buyers.

  Dorothy and Alan, taking action forthwith, moved into a room at the Water Wheel Tavern and prepared to devote the remainder of the summer to buying and restoring Fox House.

  In August, a reporter for the Doylestown Intelligencer stopped by the bar at the Water Wheel and asked the waitress if any celebrities had checked in. None that she knew of, she replied, but they did have a couple named Campbell, and Mrs. Campbell received mail addressed to Dorothy Parker. When Lester Trauch called to request an interview, Dorothy and Alan invited him to join them for dinner at the inn. Trauch showed up with another reporter, his friend Grace Chandler. Entertaining the local press, Dorothy abstemiously limited herself to one old-fashioned before dinner and a single brandy afterward. Alan turned on his full charm when he learned that Trauch, a theater lover, had enjoyed Alan’s performance in Design for Living. He was terribly pleased to find a fan in the Pennsylvania boondocks. Running through Trauch’s mind was what an odd couple the Campbells made. Alan, lithe as a dancer, appeared so much younger than Dorothy that “they might have been mother and son.”

  It became clear that buying the farm was going to be a lot more difficult than Dorothy and Alan had expected. Tom and John Ross, the legal firm they had retained to handle the closing, were having trouble with the Lithuanians. Even though they had been given notice to vacate the premises, they seemed strenuously determined to keep the Campbells out. They dramatized their protests by draping across the threshold of the front door the body of a dead groundhog. “It was August weather,” Dorothy remembered, “and the groundhog had not too recently passed on.” The squatters’ delaying tactics angered Alan so greatly that he complained to Jack Boyle, who advised patience and reminded him that the old people had standing crops to harvest and chickens to ready for market.

  “That’s their problem,” Alan said stubbornly. “Don’t they realize it’s costing Dottie and me seven hundred and fifty dollars a week to stay away from Hollywood?”

 
Actually, it was costing double that figure but fifteen hundred dollars a week would have been even less comprehensible to the Lithuanians, or to any of the Bucks County farmers for that matter.

  After retaining an architect to proceed with the alterations, they decided to stay in the area to keep an eye on the work. Alan was growing restless at the Water Wheel, their room having become cramped because both of them had a habit of piling up books and magazines on the floor. Just as the room was beginning to resemble the basement of a public library and the maid was complaining about the impossibility of cleaning, the owner of the Cuttalossa Inn near Lumberville proposed closing his establishment to the public and renting the entire quarters to the Campbells. It seemed like an ideal solution, but the natives were appalled. “It was the Depression,” said Lester Trauch, “and they must have been paying enough rent so that the Cuttalossa didn’t need any other business. People thought this was insane. We didn’t know exactly how much rent the Campbells were paying, but whatever it was seemed outrageous in our eyes.”

  In the middle of September, after an absence of three months, they left Fox House in the hands of a crew of workmen and raced back to the Coast by plane, the first of many such cross-country air trips. They were due to begin work at Selznick International on a picture that would be, they were told, a tragedy. This was unusual. During their two years in the business almost every one of their assignments had been a comedy, hardly surprising, for during the Depression comedies had become Hollywood’s forte. Operating on the theory that people out of work would not pay to see movies about people out of work, studios were usually careful to portray a fantasy world devoid of economic hardship. Even when a serious property was purchased, it somehow wound up on the screen thoroughly fumigated of anything that might kindle a thought or resemble a message. Employed solely for her wit, Dorothy was constantly typecast by producers and accepted the fact that she would probably never be invited to work on serious features. However, this was about to change.

  She did not expect much from David Selznick, the dictatorial thirty-four-year-old studio head. One of Hollywood’s self-important young Turks, as recently as 1934 he had been kicking around MGM and RKO before forming his own independent company. His track record was not particularly impressive and he was hoping to recoup some of his losses with a film about Hollywood, a subject he believed the whole world found as fascinating as he did. The trouble with previous pictures on the subject, he decided, was a lack of credibility. Basing his idea for a plot on a 1932 film, What Price Hollywood?, he visualized a movie about a determined young woman, a country bumpkin, who turns up in Hollywood to break into pictures and marries a famous movie idol. The twist is that his career begins to nose-dive just as hers is ascending, until eventually the husband, an alcoholic has-been, feels there is no alternative except to swim out to sea toward the sunset. Although Selznick considered himself a gifted screenwriter and certainly the author of this tale, he believed that it would be unwise to give himself the credit for reasons of policy. Robert Carson and William Wellman developed a screenplay, as yet untitled. Selznick signed Dorothy and Alan as a second team to rewrite the script and beef up the final dialogue. In fact, he took no writer’s contribution very seriously.

  On her arrival in Hollywood in 1934, Dorothy had made an important discovery. Everybody seemed to believe they were writers. Guards at the studio gates expounded story ideas and messenger boys bearing interoffice memos felt no qualms about suggesting dialogue. The worst offenders in this respect were producers. Evidently, Selznick believed that a film was capable of writing itself. Some years later, he openly discounted the efforts of Dorothy and Alan, as well as Carson and director William Wellman, by insisting that ninety-five percent of the dialogue in A Star Is Born “was actually straight out of life and was straight ‘reportage,’ so to speak.” That autumn he irritated Dorothy with his habit of flapping into her office around six o’clock, just as she and Alan were preparing to go home. They would spring to attention while he rejected their handiwork by beginning, “No, not this,” and then they would be compelled to stay late changing it. Equally irksome were the afternoons when he would march in with a page of dialogue he had composed and fling it on her desk.

  The following spring, the Campbells went to see A Star Is Born when it opened at Radio City Music Hall. They apparently were pleased with their work because in an interview, Dorothy pointed proudly to the script as an example of the progress Hollywood was making in respect to realism. She said happily that producers were discovering “that people, once given the chance, would be as partial to good pictures as they once were to bad ones.”

  Upon reflection, she felt that she had contributed nothing of significance to Selznick’s Technicolor opus, which may account for her subsequent negativity when she expressed surprise that anyone considered A Star Is Born a memorable picture. She also liked to pretend that she had never seen the entire film: “I went to see it, all alone, for a few minutes, and I came out, all alone.” Dorothy and Alan, with Robert Carson, were nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay, but they failed to win (the award went to the writers of The Life of Emile Zola). Carson and Wellman picked up the film’s only Oscar for Best Original Story. At the Oscar presentations, Wellman accepted the award and then rendered homage by marching it straight over to Selznick: “Take it, you had more to do with winning it than I did.”

  All the while, Dorothy and Alan, busy nesting, had their minds elsewhere. Rebuilding the farmhouse was exciting, and they devoted so many hours to studying blueprints that Alan later used them to paper a wall in the upstairs hall. They spent a great deal of time toying with color schemes, leafing transfixed through endless catalogues full of furniture, hardware, and Early American accessories. They intended the completed Fox House to be a dream.

  Another dream also seemed to be coming true that autumn. At the age of forty-three, Dorothy found herself pregnant. It looked as if a totally new phase of her life was about to begin. Over the years she had expressed her longing to “have babies,” as she put it. She and Alan were jubilant and regarded her conception as a miracle, but anxiety about her chances for carrying a baby to term made them cautious about announcing the news. Privately, she talked about little else and began to knit baby clothes.

  Once she passed the first trimester in December and revealed her pregnancy to friends, she developed a baby mania. She was soon beleaguered with requests for interviews and photographs. In response to a query from Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons, she and Alan wired: HOW DID YOU KNOW BEFORE WE DID? DOCTOR SAID SOMETIME IN JUNE. Some of her friends regarded this publicity as inappropriate. Frances Goodrich had known Dorothy in New York before she and husband Albert Hackett arrived at MGM to write the Thin Man films. Goodrich found Dorothy’s behavior pathetic: When she knew she was pregnant, she called up Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons to give them the scoop. In God’s name! Dottie Parker announcing she’s going to have a baby when she’s forty-five or something, nature’s last attempt. And knitting for the cameras!

  Despite the love Dorothy routinely lavished on her dogs, few people could imagine her as a mother. “She was great with dogs,” said a friend. “A dog couldn’t talk back and couldn’t top her jokes. But I thought she would grow very bored with motherhood. She didn’t have the staying power.” Another skeptic questioned whether it was possible for her “to have anything in common with children because they didn’t drink.” There were jocose predictions that the baby, accustomed to imbibing in utero a liquid diet of martinis and French brandy, would emerge tight and need a cup of coffee. Nobody doubted that Alan would make an exceptional father because his rapport with children was plain to see. Thomas Guinzburg has vivid recollections from his childhood of the Campbells’ visiting his parents. He remembers Alan’s extraordinary ease with himself and his sister, his sense of fun and mischief, and how ready he was for a romp. “He would be with us in the kitchen, shooting with a water pistol and spraying the cook, and I thought I’
d get blamed.” Dorothy remained in the drawing room.

  “Oh my,” Guinzburg once overhead her say, “if only the Guinzburg children were as well behaved as the Guinzburg dogs.”

  They flew to New York for the Christmas holidays. Even though no sign whatever of trouble had arisen thus far, sometime during the week between Christmas and New Year she miscarried. Her physical recovery was fairly rapid, because less than two weeks later she attended a birthday tea at Adele Lovett’s home, where she partied with Marc Connelly, John O’Hara, and Averell Harriman. Dick Myers wrote to his wife Alice Lee that she was “looking well after her mishap.” She managed to contain her feelings, deliberately minimizing the seriousness of the loss to her friends. During her New York stay, the Murphys were in Saranac Lake, New York, where Patrick had taken a turn for the worse. He died at the end of January, after an eight-year battle with tuberculosis.

  When faced with loss in the past, her typical response had been an attempt at self-destruction or a major depression, followed by efforts to survive by literary description. Now the situation was different. She had grown immeasurably stronger during her marriage. She had felt no suicidal impulses for several years—and Alan was there to offer comfort. Following the standard advice given in the case of failed pregnancies, she did her best to forget the incident as quickly as possible by getting pregnant again. After returning to California, she began infertility tests. During that winter, mourning one pregnancy and trying to achieve another, she worked on a second Selznick comedy, Nothing Sacred, and did her best to produce amusing dialogue.