Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  By spring, Fox House was finally ready for occupancy. A new cellar, a well, and electricity had been installed. They did not have a telephone because the phone company was asking three thousand dollars to bring in the lines to Pipersville, charges Dorothy and Alan considered prohibitive. They decided it would be refreshing to live “sweet and peaceful and sequestered.” The task of transforming the place into a home was left to Alan, but Dorothy agreed with his plan to pass up safe neutral tints in favor of a variety of styles and colors. The result was an unusual mixture of Colonial, Empire, and Victorian, with a few advanced touches such as indirect lighting, a style local wits derided as Pipersville Modern. Alan’s efforts delighted her but were judged to be in impossibly bad taste by some of their friends, who were swift to voice their opinions. Dorothy later excused his excesses by claiming that the interior design was a deliberate protest against the theory that present-day country dwellers ought to live like Early Americans.

  The house looked extremely cheerful and felt comfortable. The living room contained ten shades of red, including shrimp walls, Chinese red carpeting, and a wing chair upholstered in pink chintz with a large floral pattern. It was like sitting in the middle of a bowl of cherry Jell-O, but Dorothy admired the room and decided that the rosy tones made her look younger. The master bedroom was painted deep marine blue, a spacious dressing room was built, and space made for three dog beds so that a few of their nine animals could always sleep with them. Alan’s piece de résisance was lining the deeply recessed windows in the dining room with sheets of mirror to reflect the orchard beyond. Dorothy loved the idea but visitors rolled up their eyes at each other. They believed that Alan had ruined the old windows.

  Having decorated the interior without making concessions to Bucks County custom, the Campbells next set to work landscaping the grounds. Near the house stood a grove of trees, “a clump of sickly, straggly maples” as Dorothy described them, that blocked her view of the meadows. With little thought to the matter, she and Alan had the trees chopped down. When word of this desecration circulated among their writing friends, everyone expressed horror. Fifty years later, the cutting of the trees still had not been forgotten. Writer Joseph Schrank observed, “They weren’t content to citify the house, but then they started cutting down trees. It was terrible. Dottie didn’t give a damn, but the writers out there were incensed, and I remember how one playwright swore he was going to write a play about it.”

  Dorothy found the fuss incomprehensible. “Fifty-second Street Thoreaus,” she sniffed.

  Sid Perelman gazed out over the spot where the offending maples had once stood. “You must have needed the wood pretty bad,” he told her.

  This was the last straw. Indignant, she banned the Perelmans from Fox House for a time.

  Several years later, she got her revenge on Bucks County tree lovers. At a cost of nearly thirty-five thousand dollars, Moss Hart had transformed his New Hope estate practically overnight by planting thousands of pines, elms, and maples, but Dorothy remained unimpressed. When she saw the trees, she said that it only showed what God could do if He had money.

  Their first months in Fox House was a period of exceptional contentment. Alan’s homemaking pleased Dorothy. She was particularly delighted with the stone statue of Bacchus that he bought for the garden, and she also admired his cleverness with tools. After she complained about the long trip between the porch and the kitchen—she had to walk the entire length of the house for a drink—he built a chest to hold bottles, glasses, and an ice bucket. It was laboriously decorated with scrolls and colored flowers, but what made it truly beautiful was the love that had gone into it.

  It turned out that owning a country place was a little more complicated than they had anticipated. Hiring a man to handle the farm work was not a problem. He moved into the barn apartment with his family and planted their acreage with fodder corn, oats, and soybeans, as the government directed. Besides ploughing, harvesting, and functioning as gardener and handyman, Hiram Beer looked after the car and fed the animals. They were not so fortunate with other servants, despite Alan’s boast when they first bought the farm that people could always be found to run it—not in Bucks County, a community of mainly farmers. A succession of imported live-in couples began—none of them stuck around for long. In time, Alan was compelled to bring a man from Richmond to drive the Packard. He was, Joseph Schrank recalled, “the only black uniformed chauffeur I ever remember seeing in Bucks County.”

  In Alan’s capable hands, Fox House operated efficiently, at least most of the time. Dorothy had little interest in the household, nor did she even spend much time out of doors. She claimed that she loved the idea of gardening—in theory. The truth was, she left it to Hiram Beer. “I’m awfully lazy about it—and the weeds are so much quicker than I am.” Like the dogs, who were confused by the farm and needed coaxing to venture out to the porch, she remained at heart a city person who always found nature an acquired taste. Her idea of country life was sleeping until mid-afternoon, then spending a few hours reading, knitting, or chainsmoking until it was time to dress for dinner. Sometimes the chauffeur would run her into Frenchtown, New Jersey, the nearest town of any size, to visit her hairdresser, but Mary McDonald did not mind driving out to the farm to do her nails and hair.

  Much of their social life was with the Perelmans, whose house was located in Erwinna, and with Ruth and Augustus Goetz who lived in nearby Keller’s Church. [Gus Goetz was an ex-stockbroker. Several years later the Goetzes became playwrights with successful dramatic collaborations such as The Heiress and The Immoralist. ] When it was the Campbells’ turn to entertain, their dinner parties ran along predictable lines. Meals were served quite late, sometimes before 11:00 P.M. but more frequently later, because Dorothy enjoyed a lengthy cocktail hour. Ruth Goetz noticed that “she drank her martinis with real thirst, as if she were having ice tea on a hot day.”

  As the evening wore on, Alan would dance back and forth to the kitchen, where the cook was marking the time, which was transforming her meal into a blackened mess. Dorothy never ventured into the kitchen. When the dinner could be delayed no longer, she strolled into the dining room as if she were as much a guest in the house as the Goetzes or the Perelmans. By this time, everyone was so inebriated that no one cared about the meal.

  At her hungriest, Dorothy managed only slight interest in food. When the Campbells were invited out, she always got down a little of anything put before her and, like a mannerly child, made a point of whispering, “Oh, that’s lovely.” Said Ruth Goetz, “She overthanked you when she arrived and overthanked you when she left.” At Fox House, if Alan happened to be absent or the cook had quit, Dorothy didn’t eat.

  Houseworkers constantly disappeared. “It was the weird hours,” Roy Eichel guessed. “Dottie and Alan went to bed half-drunk at four in the morning and then slept until the next afternoon. They expected their help to stay up till dawn cleaning up and then to be awake whenever they got up. They had a terrible time keeping people because nobody wanted to live like that.” It was not unusual for weekend guests to come downstairs on Sunday morning and find the cook gone. Before they knew it, they were preparing their own breakfast and Dorothy’s as well.

  In the winter of 1936, during a brief trip to New York, Dorothy met Alan’s mother, who had come up from Virginia. Horte Campbell was outraged over her son’s marriage to a woman only twelve years younger than herself. As Marc Connelly remembered, she was so mad “about his marrying this horrible creature that her southern pride near could have blown up the entire United States,” and he watched “the little forks coming out of Horte’s eyes” whenever she looked at her daughter-in-law. Throughout the visit, which Dorothy likened to “a cycle of Cathay,” Horte kept muttering that the rigorous climate was killing her. The other Mrs. Campbell also took pleasure in calling attention to her daughter-in-law’s age by addressing her, sweetly, as “my little daughter.” Dorothy put up a show of cordiality while privately gnashing her teeth and mocking
Horte’s southern accent, saying that she was the only woman alive who pronounced the word egg as if it had three syllables.

  After they moved to Bucks County, Horte complained of feeling lonely in Richmond and insisted she could be helpful to Dorothy and Alan if she were to live at the farm. It was not hard to figure out what was on her mind. She schemed to stay in the house during their absence once when they flew back to Hollywood for an assignment. Dorothy said, only half-jokingly, “She fired our farmer—and oh boy, are they hard to replace—fired our servants, and set fire to the drawing room.” To ward off further trouble, she proposed buying Horte a house of her own in Bucks County, which at least would prevent her from camping at the farm. In time, a cottage was found a few miles away in Point Pleasant. It was a modest house compared to Fox House, but otherwise perfectly suitable for a single person. Horte felt it lacked grandeur and enjoyed referring to it as her “rotten lil ole shayukah,” pronouncing shack in three syllables. Dorothy fumed, “The fact that Alan and I bought her the ‘shayukah’ at great expense, and kept it going at greater, means nothing.”

  Nor did the gift of the house solve the problem of Horte’s interference in their lives. Quite the opposite: Living nearby merely enabled her to drop in whenever she liked, although in the winter she usually returned to Virginia. Her presence sometimes annoyed Alan more than Dorothy. Lillian Hellman and Dorothy were once knitting before the living room fireplace while Alan and his mother were upstairs quarreling. As the afternoon wore on, it began to snow, and Dorothy heaped more wood on the fire until it was built high. The silence in the room was broken only by bloodcurdling shouts and recriminations that drifted down from the second floor. Dorothy sighed but made no comment. Suddenly, the racket stopped and Alan came pounding down the stairs. When he appeared in the living room, he immediately began to vent his anger on their fire.

  “It’s as hot as hell in here,” he said balefully.

  “Not for orphans,” Dorothy replied.

  One morning a young man knocked at the back door of Ruth Goetz’s house in Keller’s Church. He introduced himself as a Communist Party organizer for Bucks County, who had got her name from the rolls of the New York office. “From now on,” he told her, “you’ll be paying your dues to me every month.” After she handed over her fifty cents, he asked directions to Pipersville, specifically to Fox House. Until then, Ruth was unaware of Dorothy’s connection with the C.P.

  Subsequently, the same young man appeared regularly in the neighborhood to collect dues and to conduct informal meetings. Usually the group consisted of Dorothy and Ruth with their husbands, who, Ruth recalled, “looked upon us as if we were mad women. Alan was absolutely agreeable and Gus always said, ‘Well, if that’s the way you feel—’ We believed there was a war coming, and we were all very concerned about politics at that time.” Sometimes Sid and Laura Perelman appeared but from no particular desire to study Marxism. Laura, open-minded about the subject, indicated willingness to learn, but Sid was very apparently bored.

  Ruth Goetz believed that Dorothy’s allegiance to the C.P. lasted about two years. She recalled a particular meeting when “this poor inexperienced boy thought he was going to have a grouping of the faithful for his lecture on Karl Marx. It turned out to be a slim evening for him, because we all asked difficult questions.” Long before Stalin drew up his nonaggression pact with Hitler in 1939, she was busy knitting socks for the British army. Dorothy also carried a knitting bag, said Goetz. “We both were knitting for England. Our affiliation with the Party was over.”

  Dorothy did not, in fact, share Ruth Goetz’s disgust about Stalin’s purge of his political enemies. Dorothy endorsed the verdicts. In April 1938, she and Alan were among one hundred and fifty American artists and educators who signed a statement declaring that the evidence presented during the Moscow trials established “a clear presumption of the guilt of the defendants.” Furthermore, the signers urged support for the Soviet Union, because it was struggling to free itself from “insidious internal dangers.”

  It is impossible to determine the degree of Dorothy’s involvement with the Communist Party. A number of her nonpolitical friends were convinced of her membership, for no better reason than she subscribed to the Moscow News. Ring Lardner, Jr., a member of the C.P.’s Hollywood section, recalled that she and Alan joined together. “It was quite brief. They belonged to a special group that was sheltered [by the Party] and kept away from meetings. Shortly afterward, they went off to Paris. I don’t think they picked up the membership after they came back to Hollywood.” Writer Budd Schulberg, he said, “recruited them.”

  Schulberg, another Hollywood Party member in the late thirties, said that he did not remember specifically recruiting Dorothy nor did he know for certain that she was a member. “Everyone at that time knew she was sympathetic,” he said. He added that “there were people who made contributions without actually joining. There was a gray area.”

  There was no doubt about her feelings. She believed that Communism was the great crusade of her time, the U.S. Communist Party the one movement from which great deeds might emerge, the only political party where there was love, even rapture, to be got and given. She was vulnerable to such systems. During the 1930s, she lent the Party the prestige of her name. She joined more than thirty organizations, including the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the League of Women Shoppers, and the International Workers Order. She contributed money to these organizations, which would later be described as Communist fronts, and permitted them to list her as a sponsor on their letterheads and fund-raising appeals. She was convinced they were worthy causes. It never occurred to her to ask probing questions about their origins or how the collected money was actually spent.

  While there is much to suggest that she joined the Communist Party, there is no conclusive evidence to prove that she actually did so. Some claim that she became a secret member, and it is easy to imagine how enticing she would have found such an idea. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation subsequently attempted to establish her membership, their efforts failed. In 1947, reviewing its files on her, the Bureau put together a nineteen-page memorandum that summarized her activities during the previous decade. After a biographical blurb taken from Who’s Who in America and a list of her publications, also copied verbatim from Who’s Who, the memo went on to address the subject, “Evidence of Communist Party Membership and Affiliation.” The following six pieces of evidence were presented:On May 6, 1937, an anonymous outside source advised that Dorothy Parker was among those who had contributed to the Communist Movement.

  A report received by the Bureau from G-2, dated October 23, 1940, described Dorothy Parker as a Communist Party member, writer for New Masses, member of the “Stinkers Committee,” and a signer of the “Let Stalin Alone” letter.

  Time Magazine in its publication of January 6, 1941, in an article on “The Revolt of the Intellectuals,” described Dorothy Parker as an ally of the Communists in 1938 although not a Communist herself. She was called a fellow traveler who wanted to help fight Fascism.

  The Washington Times Herald of September 8, 1941, carried an article saying that Congressman Martin Dies had accused Leon Henderson, director of the Office of Price Administration, of being a Communist. He referred to Henderson’s argument with a photographer at his home when the photographer tried to take a photograph of a nationally prominent Communist. The article said that Henderson identified the Communist as being Dorothy Parker. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxx1 said that he had been advised byxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxx1 that Dorothy Parker had broken all her ties with the Communist Party. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.1

  Nineteen forty-seven, the year that this memo was compiled, was a dangerous time for those holding leftist beliefs. Membership in a list of supposedly subversive organizations drawn up by the Attorney General’s office branded people disloyal and therefore unemplo
yable. In Hollywood, the film industry quaked when Congressman J. Parnell Thomas served forty-five actors, writers, and directors with subpoenas commanding their presence before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Of this number, nineteen unfriendly witnesses—quickly labeled the Hollywood Nineteen—refused to cooperate. Ten who were eventually cited for contempt of Congress served prison terms.

  Lillian Hellman provided an account of Dorothy’s experience with HUAC in her memoirs. She claimed that when the subpoena arrived, she offered to accompany her to the hearing. Dorothy looked puzzled and asked “Why, Lilly?” Hellman interpreted this to mean that she regarded the ruling classes as nothing more than people who had more money than she did. Hellman went on to commend Dorothy’s hauteur before the Committee, as if she were telling them, “Yes, dear, it’s true that I’m here to observe you, but I do not like you and will, of course, say and write exactly that.”

  As with so many of Lillian Hellman’s memories, this simply was not true. Dorothy was not among those who received a pink slip in 1947, nor was she summoned as a witness in the HUAC hearings during the early fifties, because the government must have known that it had a weak case. Dorothy herself made two rather emphatic statements on the subject. In 1937, she wrote that she belonged to no political party, her only group affiliation having been with “that not especially brave little band that hid its nakedness of heart and mind under the out-of-date garment of a sense of humor.” Fourteen years later, she denied having ever been a Party member, although it is easy to understand that the circumstances under which she made the statement might have warranted the stretching of the truth.