Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  In 1937, after the Communist Party decided to form alliances with nonrevolutionary groups like the Democratic party, Hollywood began to resemble a tropical rain forest that teemed with lush varieties of political ideologies and activities. In this steamy atmosphere of the Popular Front, the distinctions between Communism and home-grown American liberalism tended to blur.

  An interesting paradox began to develop in the C.P. On the one hand, it was a fairly accessible organization—all that was required to obtain information was listening. Even the indifferent—and Dorothy was far from indifferent—had difficulty avoiding both the C.P. gospel and C.P. members. All over town they could be encountered at Chasen’s or Screen Writers Guild meetings or the studio commissaries.

  At the same time, an air of secrecy had grown up around the Hollywood C.P. Chiefly, this seems to have been a result of the Party’s doctrine of expediency—the notion that there was little to gain if they frightened the people they wanted to influence by waving radical ideas under their noses. As C.P. functionaries have since explained, it was standard procedure for Party members active in politics or union organizing, particularly in the Screen Writers Guild, to avoid open participaton in Party work. Contributing to the secrecy was the fact that the Hollywood C.P. did not issue membership cards. Ring Lardner, Jr., later stated that the organizatonal secretary probably kept a list of members in order to record dues payments, but most likely even that used pseudonyms or partial names. Lardner and Dalton Trumbo ridiculed the C.P. cards reading “Ring L.” and “Dalt T.” that HUAC produced at the 1947 hearings of the Hollywood Ten.

  The fact that some found the melodrama of belonging to a secret society appealing does not seem remarkable in an industry whose product was fantasy. Ring Lardner recalled that during telephone conversations he made from his MGM office, he referred to Party meetings as poker games. Meetings were generally sheltered events held in private homes, where people sat around with drinks in their hands, so that the gathering would look like a cocktail party if an outsider happened to barge in. One writer stashed his library of Marxist literature in a secret compartment of his bar. Others concealed their political activities from wives or lovers. Lillian Hellman wrote that, despite her attendance at three or four C.P. gatherings with Dashiell Hammett, with whom she was living at the time, he never divulged whether or not he was a member. She suspected that he joined in 1937 or 1938, but she never asked “and if I had asked would not have been answered,” a state of affairs that she attributed to the peculiar nature of their relationship.

  The main person to connect Dorothy with being a secret member of the Party was Martin Berkeley, an ex-Communist screenwriter (My Friend Flicka) who appeared as a cooperative witness before HUAC in 1951 and managed to win a good deal of publicity by naming 158 individuals whom he claimed had been C.P. members in the thirties. Berkeley testified that he knew exactly when—mid-June 1937—the Hollywood section of the Party had been organized because it had taken place at his home, since his place had a big living room and ample parking facilities. Among those who showed up, he said, were five prominent writers: Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, Donald Ogden Stewart, Lillian Hellman, and Dashiell Hammett. He went on to say that after the meeting at his house he never saw any of those five writers again. Curious, he asked his Party superior about their whereabouts and was told they had been assigned to a group known as “party members at large,” that he had seen the last of them as far as organizational meetings were concerned. A member at large, Berkeley explained to the Committee, meant that “you are pretty important and you don’t want to be exposed.” It was his guess that the important writers had ended up meeting secretly with Party functionaries like John Howard Lawson or V. J. Jerome to receive instructions but otherwise had no contact, for their own protection as well as for that of the Party.

  Accusations such as Berkeley’s destroyed Dorothy’s career during the fifties. Unable to find work as a screenwriter, she paid dearly for her transgressions, real or invented, but she never called attention to her plight, never singled herself out as exceptional or in any way worthy of admiration, in contrast to Lillian Hellman who felt compelled to exalt her behavior. Dorothy declined to speak of her politics, past or present. When an interviewer once tried to question her about the political consciousness in Hollywood during the 1930s, she affected not to understand the question. “I haven’t the faintest idea about the politics of Hollywood, and you make me laugh when you speak of them.”

  Living in Pennsylvania and working in California meant the expense of supporting two establishments, but the money continued to roll in. In May 1937, Dorothy and Alan signed a five-year contract with Samuel Goldwyn at a combined weekly salary of fifty-two hundred dollars. The new contract was respectfully reported by the press, for that amount was remarkable by anyone’s standards and close to the upper limit of salaries being paid to screenwriters. Returning to Hollywood on June 7, they moved into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where Alan abruptly—and inexplicably—began to institute economies. Contending that the hotel was expensive and noisy, he rented a house in Beverly Hills and hired a single servant. This about-face toward spartan living failed to please him either. He described their new quarters at 710 North Linden Drive as “hideous.”

  At first they liked the studio. As the name plates on the doors of the Writers’ Building attested, Sam Goldwyn made a practice of hiring top-quality writers. In the office next to theirs was their friend Lillian Hellman.

  The picture that Dorothy and Alan had been signed to work on was called The Cowboy and the Lady, a romantic comedy intended for Merle Oberon and Gary Cooper. It had already run through several titles and an equal number of writers, including Anita Loos and John Emerson, but the Campbells were entrusted with writing the final draft. They soon discovered that while Goldwyn wanted only the most important writers, his disregard for their work was no different than other Hollywood producers’. When the new script failed to satisfy him, they were yanked off the project and reassigned to The Goldwyn Follies, a musical blockbuster that was to make use of beautiful women, outstanding comics, Gershwin music and lyrics, and George Balanchine dances. All that it lacked was a decent script. Once again a band of writers had preceded Dorothy and Alan, who, remembering their fifty-two hundred a week, struggled to devise still another version. While Goldwyn seemed pleased, he thought it could use a fresher finish and eventually showed their draft to Ben Hecht, who talked him out of it and into a completely new one written by himself. When The Goldwyn Follies did poorly, Dorothy and Alan cackled with glee. Hecht had claimed the sole writing credit for himself.

  Finally, Goldwyn shifted them to another project that had been worked over by practically every writer on the lot. You Can Be Beautiful was supposed to tell the story of an entrepreneur like Elizabeth Arden or Helena Rubenstein, a woman who revolutionizes the beauty business. For the movies, she had to be beautiful and happy. When Dorothy was asked for a new twist, she proposed making the heroine plain as a pancake, a contented duckling who is transformed into an unhappy beauty. Garson Kanin remembered Goldwyn’s reaction:“God damn it, Dottie!” he thundered. “You and your God damn sophisticated jokes. You’re a great writer. You’re a great poet.” He paused, frowning in an effort to recall something. He quoted, “ ‘Men never make a pass at girls wearing eyeglasses.’ That’s a great poem and you wrote it. You’re a great wit. You’re a great woman, but you haven’t got a great audience and you know why? Because you don’t want to give people what they want.”

  Dorothy’s wide, innocent face looked up at him. “But Mr. Goldwyn,” she said softly, “people don’t know what they want until you give it to them.”

  “You see that?” said Goldwyn to the world. “You just did it again. Wisecracks. I told you there’s no money in wisecracks. People want a happy ending.”

  Dottie rose. “I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn,” she said, “but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one
ever had a happy ending.”

  She left the room.

  Goldwyn surveyed those of us who remained. “Does anybody in here know what the hell that woman was talking about?”

  No doubt they did but nobody dared try to explain it.

  Back in the summer of 1936, the Screen Writers Guild had disbanded, but it looked as if it was about to rise phoenix-like from its ashes. Dorothy threw herself wholeheartedly into making sure it did. Even though the studios believed the Guild had died, a handful of people had kept it alive for the past year by meetings at private homes, Dorothy and Alan’s among them. An unpublished poem Dorothy wrote during the days of clandestine organizing was titled “The Passionate Screen Writer To His Love.” Its opening stanza provoked grins among screenwriters in 1937 and Marc Connelly carefully preserved it among his papers:Oh come, my love, and join with me

  The oldest infant industry.

  Come seek the bourne of palm and pearl,

  The lovely land of Boy-Meets-Girl,

  Come grace this lotus-laden shore,

  This Isle of Do-What’s-Done-Before.

  Come, curb the new, and watch the old win,

  Out where the streets are paved with Goldwyn.

  The Guild had been waiting for a favorable ruling by the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the Wagner Act. When this happened on April 12, the Guild lost no time in drafting a petition for a National Labor Relations Board hearing. The studios had insisted all along that writers were artists, therefore ineligible to unionize. The hearing would be a test case to see whether or not writers could be considered labor.

  Less than two weeks after Dorothy’s return to Hollywood, the Guild held its first open meeting at the Hollywood Athletic Club. More than four hundred writers showed up. Despite Red-baiting charges that the Communists were responsible for reforming the Guild, the slate of officers and board members elected that evening demonstrated a nice balance between conservatives, liberal Democrats, and those known to be left-wingers. Dorothy was elected to the board.

  The union organizing went on for more than a year until the National Labor Relations Board ruled in June 1938 that screenwriters did indeed qualify as workers under the Wagner Act. A certification election held that same month allowed them to choose either the Screen Writers Guild or the more conservative Screen Playwrights as their representative. The Screen Writers Guild won by a vote of more than four to one.

  Though the Guild did not win its first contract until 1941, nine years after the organizing had begun, the battle had been won. Dorothy thought that “the bravest, proudest word in all the dictionaries” was organize, but she was realistic enough to believe “that if a screenwriter had his name across the Capital Theatre in red, white, and blue letters fifty feet tall, he’d still be anonymous.”

  Chapter 14

  BAD FIGHTS

  1937-1941

  Hollywood offered an uncommonly rich lode of raw material for satire. Although Dorothy loathed the place, she was unable to write anything about it. Instead, she merely looked on while friends published their observations in books for which she often composed laudatory reviews. Nathanael West finished The Day of the Locust, Budd Schulberg wrote What Makes Sammy Run?, and Sid Perelman reeled out sulfurous pieces ridiculing the movie titans who “forgather in their knotty-pine libraries beside the murmurous Pacific” while cigar smoke “wreathes their Renoirs.” Scott Fitzgerald, who was eventually inspired to write The Last Tycoon about the legendary Irving Thalberg, arrived in Hollywood during the summer of 1937. Seeing him again triggered Dorothy’s guilt about abandoning her fiction writing.

  Dorothy’s former drinking companion looked pale and his hair had begun to thin, but he was unquestionably functional. He explained with great pride that he had been on the wagon for ten months. He moved into the Garden of Allah, where he lived chastely and consumed huge quantities of Coca-Cola. Scott was struggling to deal with serious troubles. Zelda had been diagnosed as incurable and would probably remain hospitalized for the rest of her life. Since he was barely earning a living lately, he was delighted when his agent secured him a six-month contract at MGM, where he was to be paid a thousand dollars a week.

  Dorothy tried to head off his reproaches about her lack of productivity by taking the offensive and warning him that screen writing was exhausting work. When she spoke about the impossibility of serving two masters, Fitzgerald scoffed and retorted that he planned to get up early and write before reporting to MGM. He wrote to Max Perkins that Dorothy’s trouble was laziness. What he failed to realize was how much of her energy was directed into the Communist Party and the Screen Writers Guild. What he did know of these activities only made him suspicious. Having always found her basically self-concerned—a “spoiled” writer, he said—he did not believe that her conversion to Communism had any effect on her “supremely indifferent” attitude toward others.

  Dorothy sought to lure Fitzgerald into radical politics by inviting him to social-cum-political functions. One of the memorable events of that summer was Ernest Hemingway’s arrival in July with a documentary film about the Spanish war. Dorothy made sure that Scott was invited to the private benefit screening at the home of Fredric March. The politically concerned element in the movie business turned out in force to see The Spanish Earth, a film that Hemingway had shot with Dutch director Joris Ivens and for which he also had written and recorded the narration. Frankly partisan in its support of the Spanish Republic, it demonstrated the anguish of the people and the way that war had affected their lives. After a screening at the White House for the Roosevelts, Hemingway was now hoping to obtain commercial distribution by one of the major studios as well as contributions for the purchase of ambulances. He promised that a donation of one thousand dollars would put an ambulance in action at the front in only four weeks. Dorothy, who had invested five hundred dollars in the film, was one of the few guests to buy an entire ambulance.

  Lillian Hellman later wrote that after the screening Dorothy and Alan invited Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and a number of other friends to their house for a nightcap. According to Hellman, she accepted the offer of a lift from Fitzgerald, whom she described as acutely melancholy, perhaps even suffering delirium tremens, because he drove along at ten miles an hour with his hands trembling on the wheel. Pulling up at Dorothy’s house, he expressed fear about going in because he was on the wagon and terrified of Hemingway. “It’s a long story, Ernest and me,” Hellman reported him as saying. She replied that he mustn’t be afraid. They entered the house hand in hand at the precise moment that Hemingway, who was standing with his back to the door, decided to heave a highball glass against the stone fireplace. The sound of the smashing glass sent Fitzgerald into shell shock. Hellman shepherded him into the kitchen, where Dorothy and Alan were fixing drinks and Dashiell Hammett was getting drunk. Hellman recalls that her appeals to Hammett to help poor “Mr. Fitzgerald” proved useless and that Hammett remarked that Ernest had no gift for portraying women but only displayed them in his fiction in order to admire them, but she was unable to recall anything more about the evening. She and Scott never met again.

  But this account is not true. Hellman herself wrote that she first met Hemingway in Paris a few months later, which is confirmed by the recollection of other individuals. Moreover, on the day of the screening, Hemingway and Fitzgerald had enjoyed a convivial luncheon together with Robert Benchley, who sent Gertrude a report of their reunion. There was no indication that this meeting was anything but warm and good-humored. The morning after The Spanish Earth was shown, Fitzgerald sent Hemingway a telegram of congratulations.

  Not long after this, Dorothy’s proprietary interest in Scott’s political education came to an end. She invited him to a dinner dance sponsored by the Screen Writers Guild at the Coconut Grove nightclub. As organizer of the fund-raising dinner, she reserved a large table for her personal guests, including Scott, and danced often with him during the evening. When he was alone at the table, he noticed a pretty blonde near
by and began to cast admiring glances in her direction. This was Sheilah Graham, the reporter who had interviewed Dorothy about her tattoo, now an up-and-coming Hollywood gossip columnist. In Sheilah Graham, Scott would try to find a replacement for Zelda.

  Dorothy and Alan made a precipitous and disgusted departure from Hollywood in early August. After two months of frustration, they learned that Sam Goldwyn was not planning to extend their option and that their ballyhooed five-year contract would yield only $52,000 instead of a projected $1.3 million. While they had not really counted on becoming millionaires, neither had they envisioned a mere ten weeks of employment for which they would receive not a single writing credit. They certainly did not expect to be cashiered without warning. Benchley told his wife, “Their jobs blew up.”

  In a huff, Dorothy and Alan gave up the house on North Linden Drive and hurried back to Bucks County, where they planned to be farmers. A few days later, deciding that they deserved a holiday after the recent unpleasantness, they changed their minds and set off on a European vacation. Dorothy had not been abroad since 1932 and Alan had never been, so she was eager to conduct him around the sights. When they sailed for France aboard the Normandie on August 18, Lillian Hellman was with them.

  On the boat they befriended Martha Gellhorn, a writer who was having an affair with Ernest Hemingway and who became his third wife after he divorced Pauline. The handsome, golden-haired Gellhorn had become involved with Hemingway while covering the war in Spain for Collier’s. They planned to meet in Paris before returning to Spain together. The Campbells hit it off immediately with Martha Gellhorn, even though her idea of shipboard fun was an energetic workout in the gymnasium. Dorothy would rather have eaten nails than exercise, but she admired Martha’s fitness and thought she was “truly fine—even leaving aside her looks and her spirit and her courage and her decency—though I can’t imagine why they should be shoved aside....” It turned out to be an unexpectedly enjoyable crossing, except for the pouting presence of Lillian Hellman who could not manage to conceal completely her jealousy of Gellhorn and later made catty remarks about “her well-tailored pants and good boots,” as if she were covering a war for Vogue.