Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  It was fortunate that Alan had plenty of patience, because Dorothy could be a surly collaborator. While they were writing Sweethearts at MGM, the neighboring office was occupied by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. When the door was open, they could hear Dorothy and Alan composing dialogue out loud.

  “And then what does he say?” Alan asked.

  Dorothy’s answer was soft but audible. “Shit.”

  “Please don’t use that word,” Alan muttered. Turning back to his typewriter, he continued, “All right—and then what does she say?”

  “Shit.”

  “Don’t use that word!”

  According to Albert Hackett, Alan did all the typing. “He also did all the work. He pushed Dottie.” Often she would be in a complaining, critical mood. She spoke disdainfully about the money they earned, saying that they spent every penny—their paychecks melted like ice cubes. People in Hollywood got on her nerves too. At a party, she listened politely as British actor Herbert Marshall made repeated references to his busy “shedule.” When she could stand it no longer, she burst out, “I think you’re full of skit.”

  Despite her complaints, she never seriously suggested they leave Hollywood.

  You could have the most remarkable house. You could have a pool, if you wished. I don’t swim. My goodness, you could have so many things. And you said to yourself while you were there, “For heaven’s sake, I might as well live as good as I can while I have to be here.”

  Occasionally she enjoyed a wonderful laugh, as when a producer once asked her, “Now listen—are we extracting the milk of the theme?” Since extraction was tough work, she never belittled the sweat that went into screen writing. To an interviewer who suggested the work was demeaning, she quickly protested, “No, it wasn’t dreadful. It was a terrible bore. It was a strenuous bore. You sat there and you sat there and you sat there. That’s what it was.”

  After work, Alan drove them to the house they had purchased in the provinces, way out in Coldwater Canyon. She had been charmed by the place at first sight, because its authentic bar had once been part of an old San Francisco saloon. It was a comfortable small house with a large garden, perched on the side of a hill. She made no objection to the pink satin drapes and cabbage rose wallpaper Alan installed in the living room. They lived there off and on for two years. One day, she looked out the window and told Alan they would have to move immediately because there was “a suicide light” rippling on the hill behind the house.

  They hastened back to the Garden of Allah, where the light did not make her think that it might be refreshing to be dead.

  A newspaper reporter asked her if she would care to say a few words about her life.

  By all means. It was “terrible.”

  Didn’t she enjoy anything?

  Certainly. “Flowers, French fried potatoes, and a good cry.”

  In the spring of 1939, Madrid fell to the Fascists, and President Roosevelt recognized the Franco government. Even though the war in Spain had been lost, the refugee situation remained grim. A half-million Spanish Republicans, having fled to France, were stranded on the French side of the frontier. Money had to be raised in America so that something could be done for them.

  Dorothy was able to collect thousands of dollars in a single evening by inviting Hollywood friends to her home and calling it a party. Since she had a tendency to assume personal responsibility for world catastrophe, she gave herself no credit. She insisted that she was not doing enough to help while she complained simultaneously that raising money was “the dirtiest of all jobs.” Public speaking still made her miserably nervous.

  As conditions in Europe worsened during 1939, she grew more agitated about Hitler. Nazis obsessed her, and she affected to spy storm troopers behind every tree. Many people in America were unwilling to listen. Her habit of appealing to people’s emotions sometimes struck them as paranoid and hysterical.

  In Boston, at a Foreign Policy Association luncheon, Dorothy portrayed the Germans as demons. One of the guests, chalking her remarks up to exaggeration, thought it was a pity a more objective speaker had not been invited. In Washington, a party for the Loyalists at the home of New Deal economist Leon Henderson, Dorothy arrived in an expensive fur coat. Sitting on a baby grand piano, she first talked calmly about the war, but soon could not keep from boiling over into angry tears. The living room was packed wall to wall with dry-eyed, embarrassed guests who stared at her. She began scolding. “If you had seen what I saw in Spain, you’d be serious too. And you’d be up on this piano, trying to help those people.” A humorist in the year 1939 was whistling sad songs, she decided, became nothing was funny in the world anymore. Twenty-five years later, talking about the Spanish defeat remained difficult for her because, she said, “I die hard.”

  The Spanish Children’s Milk Fund, as her group was now called, mailed out letters and signed Dorothy’s name. Among those regularly solicited for contributions or labor were writers once associated with the Round Table. Robert Benchley, asked to emcee a benefit, scribbled a curt refusal. The relentless letters annoyed Edna Ferber, whose crusty all-purpose RSVP stated that she did not wish to be a patron, purchase a box seat, attend the Coq Rouge cocktail party, or support a Stars for Spain benefit, but she was enclosing five dollars for two tickets, which she did not intend to use. Bill Benét, invited to a luncheon honoring Dorothy, sent his acceptance in verse:Though the world grows darker

  And life grows starker,

  I’m all for a luncheon

  For Dorothy Parker.

  Meanwhile, Dorothy went on appearing at rallies even though there were times when she had to wire the Milk Fund, “... would you send me brief encouraging wire as to what my speech is to be about.” If the number of extant form letters is any measurement, great quantities of mail went out, all of this correspondence carried on by the industrious Milk Fund staff. Dorothy, who was in Pennsylvania or California, never saw the letters, a situation she would be at a loss to explain when an investigating committee questioned her about it in the 1950s.

  The terrible year of 1939 was a year of personal failure for Dorothy and Alan. They collaborated on a play, an adaptation of a comedy by the Hungarian playwright Miklos Laszlo. When they finished, The Happiest Man was practically a new work. The happy man of the title works for a plumbing supply company, has everything in life he wants, then the company suddenly fires him after eighteen years. Dorothy sprinkled the script with polemics, which got watered down in the end and lost some of their bite, but it was an amusing play that looked like it would reach Broadway without problems. Otto Preminger was asked to direct, Paul Muni and Burgess Meredith to play the leads. Then, for no apparent reason, producer Max Gordon dropped his option. In despair, Dorothy and Alan themselves took a six-month option and tried to get it produced. Not until 1942 did she acknowledge defeat and admit that The Happiest Man had gone “completely by-by.”

  Again, the dream of theatrical success eluded her. The closest she got to Broadway was journeying to Baltimore for the out-of-town opening of Lillian Hellman’s new play, The Little Foxes. The title, taken from the Song of Solomon, had been Dorothy’s suggestion. As if that was not frustrating enough, the Algonquin Hotel was suing her about a party she had given for Philip Barry after the opening of his new play, Here Come the Clowns. The unpaid bill sent Frank Case to court claiming that her guests had eaten 182 dinners and drank 730 cocktails. The court awarded the Algonquin $488.22, which Dorothy probably had never intended to pay since she always regarded the hotel as one of her patrons. Apparently, Case thought she had become rich. She told a newspaper columnist that, despite her salary, she was forced to sell her house and move to a hotel because she gave away nearly everything she earned. “Dot,” Charles MacArthur remarked to Janet Flanner, “will never be happy until she is on relief.”

  In 1939, she became pregnant again. She took no care to curtail her activities and seemed not to care whether she lost the baby. Perhaps by this time she sensed that she would abort n
o matter the precautions she took, which was precisely what occurred. Afterward, suffering from a lingering, low-grade depression, she insisted she must have diabetes mellitus, until her doctor managed to convince her it simply was not true.

  The miscarriage marked an important turning point in Dorothy’s relations with Alan. Their marriage was never the same again, once the structural defects in its foundation slowly began to expose themselves. Entirely apart from the fact that Alan loved her deeply, he had seemed to be an ideal partner in many ways, both prescription and placebo for her ailments when she was forty. He made plausible the middle-aged woman’s idyll of rejuvenation by a young lover, the alcoholic’s prayer for alliance with a devoted fixer, the orphan’s longing for a protective mother. On a fantasy level, Alan was practically perfect, except for the fact that he was not rich. Secretly, Dorothy had always resented his lack of a private fortune. On one occasion, after she had roundly abused him before a gathering of friends, someone reminded her that he was a charming, handsome man who adored her. What more did she want from the poor guy? “Presents,” she growled. One of her most popular verses, written in 1923, expressed a belief from her childhood, that love was better when it was attached to money:Why is it no one ever sent me yet

  One perfect limousine, do you suppose?

  Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get

  One perfect rose.

  She had received many perfect roses from Alan but he was never able to present her with a limousine that her own labor had not helped to finance. She knew that his income since their marriage had depended entirely on being her husband. She also suspected that without her, his career as a screenwriter would dry up and blow away. Even though she needed him badly, he needed her even more desperately, but this subject they were unable to broach, let alone discuss. Still, for the first five years of their marriage, this trade-off and their endless mutual dependencies had been obscured by Dorothy’s fruitless quest for a baby.

  Marrying a thirty-year-old husband had allowed her to roll back the clock and pretend that she was his contemporary, thereby enabling her to plan for a baby as might any thirty-year-old bride. Like most Faustian bargains, this one held for a while.

  She had sex faithfully, whether Alan felt like it or not, and she spent the better part of five years hanging around gynecologists’ waiting rooms. Submitting herself to every infertility treatment known to medical research had resulted in at least two pregnancies (if there were more there is no record), followed by two spontaneous abortions, which had caused her a surprising amount of physical discomfort, but she had persevered without complaint.

  While most people thought Alan would make a splendid father, and he himself expressed eagerness for children, Dorothy was not fully convinced. As each of her pregnancies advanced, as she began to gain weight and take on pouter-pigeon proportions, she detected subtle shifts in his feelings toward her, changes that provoked her own ambivalences about having a child. As early as a few weeks into a pregnancy, she felt roly-poly and unattractive, which accentuated the age difference between herself and Alan. The process of reproduction, by which she hoped to recall her youth, also made her look and feel her actual age and exacerbated her fears about losing Alan to a younger woman.

  Another aspect of their marriage that pregnancy threatened to disturb was their child-mother relationship. A genuine child in the family would have presented Dorothy with a sibling rival. Beneath Alan’s superficial enthusiasm for the idea of fathering, she detected a whispered message that he was not as interested in caring for two children as everyone assumed.

  They claimed to be eager for a child, yet they never considered the obvious alternative of adoption.

  After the miscarriage, her weight pushing one hundred and fifty pounds, she neglected her grooming and moaned that she wanted to shut herself in a room and push the bureau across the door. When Alan suggested they take a vacation, she scorned the idea as stupid. She could not prance off on a grand tour with all the misery and suffering in the world. Once she had whined herself out, she agreed that it might not be a bad idea after all. The whole world lay before them: “We can go any place our fancy takes us,” Alan wrote the Goetzes, and he named the possibilities: Rome, Petrograd, Budapest, Paris, Blue Ball [Pennsylvania]. They chose Paris. Dorothy perked up and wrote to her sister, “Things have been pretty bad as I think you guess and this may be a life saver.”

  On June 17, they sailed on the Veendam, a Dutch ship that developed turbine trouble and took ten days to cross the Atlantic, during which time the bars were drunk dry. Dorothy, still portly, was irritated to learn that a number of passengers had mistaken her for Gertrude Stein. When the Paris boat train lost a car and they had to sit for hours in the countryside, Dorothy and Alan got acquainted with a group of students from Amherst and Princeton who were thrilled to meet a famous author. Dorothy’s appearance disappointed them, however. John Davies thought that she was “the sloppiest woman I ever met: cracked nail polish, stringy unflattering bangs, runny makeup, broad derriere, a shapeless unfashionable pleated dress with green and white flowers.” Helen Walker also noticed that “she wore more makeup than was becoming. She painted her cheeks with great round circles of rouge.”

  Dorothy and Alan took up residence in an elaborate apartment in Avenue Saint-Honore-d’Eylau borrowed from actress Maxine Elliott. It was decorated in the worst possible taste and to reach the apartment it was necessary to ride an ancient elevator that habitually got stuck between the second and third floors. Alan adored the place. That summer, Janet Flanner reported in The New Yorker that Paris was suddenly experiencing “a fit of prosperity, gaiety, and hospitality.” She described magnificent costume balls and garden parties, the air filled with music and the smell of money and the expensive hotels congested with American and English tourists. Still, the city seemed schizoid. Even though the chief topic of conversation was war—and everybody thought it was coming soon—nobody believed it would arrive that summer to spoil their holidays. At the same time, war was difficult to forget because the Germans sent planes over every night, and the drone of their circling made sleep difficult.

  Dorothy enjoyed buying new hats and sipping cocktails at the Crillon Bar with Sara Murphy, Muriel King, Janet Flanner, and Louise Macy. Again, she and Alan got together with the students they met on the train, especially with Helen and Bob Walker. On the Fourth of July, the Walkers joined them at a reception at the American Embassy. When Dorothy was immediately surrounded by clusters of fans, twenty-one-year-old Helen Walker was intrigued to notice that Alan disappeared into a corner and left his wife to enjoy the limelight alone. Alan impressed Helen as “a darling, just the sweetest, most considerate man.”

  For all his sweetness, it was clear that something was amiss. Helen Walker had heard about Dorothy’s miscarriage and knew she continued to feel depressed, so she made allowances for her irritability. Walker observed, “Dottie was never happy staying anywhere for very long and always wanted to keep moving.” Alan was adept at managing her moods and made excuses when she became obnoxious. “One of the things that bothered me,” said Walker, “was how hilariously funny she would be one minute and so bitter and angry the next—about the Spanish war, about people like Hemingway whom she considered hypocrites. Whenever she got caustic, Alan would tell us, ‘Well, it’s good for her to let out her anger.’ ”

  It was a trying time. A few weeks later, after they had returned to Pipersville, Dorothy was dismayed to hear that the Soviet Union and Germany had banded together in their nonaggression pact. The events during the following weeks—Hitler’s march into Poland, the English and French declaration of war, and Russia’s subsequent invasion of Poland—caused further grief. When the American Communist Party opposed the war and called the Soviet invasion justified, some of Dorothy’s friends dropped out of the C.P. The pact also caused wholesale resignations from the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which weathered this setback by changing its name to the Hollywood League for Democratic Action. Dorothy did
not pull out.

  Out of loyalty to her friends, she did not publicly criticize either the pact or Stalin or the American Communist Party, nor did she abandon any of the groups to which she had lent her name. However great her private doubts, she hewed to the party line against the war until 1941 when Hitler broke the pact by invading Russia. Then, however, she made up for those two years of silence by supporting the war wholeheartedly.

  Meanwhile, it was not pleasant to be a Communist or a fellow traveler in Hollywood, where she received severe censure from her liberal friends. Alan admitted to Aleck Woollcott that “a great many people have stopped speaking to us.”

  In the fall of 1940, Dorothy and Alan were invited to Sun Valley by Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway. On their return to Hollywood, Dorothy had a pelvic examination, which revealed the presence of uterine fibroid tumors, benign growths of fibrous connective tissues that occur commonly and usually go undetected because they produce no symptoms. Fibroids generally require no treatment, unless they begin to enlarge as did Dorothy’s. She now learned that probably the fibroids were irritated by her pregnancies, and also may have affected her ability both to conceive and to carry a fetus to term.

  Knowledge of the fibroids plummeted her into self-loathing, and she immediately imagined herself trying to pass for normal but “all the while containing a rock-garden planted with every flower mentioned in Shakespeare.” The references to Elizabethan flowers could not conceal her sense of feeling gangrenous.

  Standard treatment for fibroid tumors is removal of the uterus. Dorothy entered the hospital for a hysterectomy.

  Alan expected major trouble to follow the operation. He telegraphed the farm and ordered her favorite dog, a Sealyham terrier, shipped out by rail as a cheery surprise. He was astonished to notice that Dorothy already seemed “quite cheerful” and looked happier and more radiant than she had appeared in a long time. Convalescing in a Beverly Hills house he had rented at 602 North Bedford, cared for by a team of Canadian nurses, she stressed her guilty contentment in a letter to Aleck Woollcott: “I am full of a peaceful, negative joy that that damned operation is over.” Probably she also felt better knowing that the quest for pregnancy had ended, a relief that Alan seemed to share.