by Marion Meade
By the middle of December, Dorothy had recuperated. On Friday the thirteenth, she and Alan attended a dinner party at the home of Nathanael West and his wife, Eileen, who had been married eight months and had recently moved into a house in North Hollywood. It was a convivial evening among old friends, including Scott Fitzgerald, Elliot Paul, Frances Goodrich, and Albert Hackett. As their mood grew increasingly nostalgic, they began talking about the twenties and sang “The Last Time I Saw Paris.”
The following Saturday afternoon, Scott fell dead of a heart attack while browsing through the Princeton Alumni Weekly and eating a Hershey bar. The next day the Wests were killed in a car crash, returning home in their Ford station wagon after a weekend hunting trip below the Mexican border. Fitzgerald was forty-four, West thirty-seven. Even though Scott had suffered a minor heart attack in November and “Pep” West was notorious as one of the most maniacal drivers ever to hit the Los Angeles freeway, Alan convinced himself that he had but a short while to live. Extremely superstitious at times, certain that Friday-the-thirteenth bad luck occurred in threes, he was petrified. Robert Benchley described him as “hiding under the bed.”
Dorothy thought his behavior was silly. Her chief problem with death had always been the depressing thought that she had lacked competency to successfully do away with herself. Her imaginary hope was that on the “other side,” she would be able to eavesdrop on the living and finally learn what they had been saying behind her back.
Both of her friends were laid out at Pierce Brothers Mortuaries. Visiting the funeral home, she walked down a long, carpeted corridor to reach Scott’s casket, which had been placed on view in the William Wordsworth Room. She and Alan were among the few people in Hollywood who came to pay their respects. The embalmer had worked on Scott’s features to make him look youthful. Not a line showed on his face or a gray hair on his head. His hands, however, were as thin and wizened as an old man’s. His flesh had craved alcohol, but, despite his reform, he had still died young. Dorothy, sober, stood beside the coffin staring a long time. Although she had been sharply critical of Scott, even telling several friends that she thought he had turned into a horse’s ass, she was struck by the isolation of the room, the absence of mourners or flowers, and Hollywood’s complete disinterest in his death. To mind came Jay Gatsby’s funeral and the words spoken by the bespectacled character that Scott had named “Owl-eyes.”
“The poor son-of-a-bitch,” she said softly.
Later, when her remark made its way around the film industry, few recognized it as a quote from Fitzgerald’s novel. It was assumed that she had delivered some pithy eulogy over his coffin.
During 1939 and 1940 she began to make Alan the scapegoat for the death of her motherhood dream, and he felt obliged to accept the blame. Up to this point in their marriage she had wanted to be a good wife. Granted, she was not a conventional one, but she had behaved no differently than any male writer of comparable reputation. She had married in the expectation that Alan would appreciate her intellectual gifts and take for granted that her comfort came first. She also wanted him to be her partner, collaborator, and equal. Marriage to her had given him entrée to some of the most respected literary and theatrical figures of the time, helped him to achieve self-assurance as a writer, and enabled him to live on a scale that he probably would never have achieved on his own. She had made possible his becoming “the damnedest snob in the world,” as a friend pointed out, a person who indexed people on A, B, and C social lists, who could not host a party without engaging a butler but then made a show of forgetting the man’s name.
In addition to the tangible benefits she felt she had conferred upon him, she also had been loyal, his most dedicated defender and supporter. From the start of their marriage, some of her friends had ridiculed Alan. Benchley told the Murphys that an evening with Dorothy and Alan reminded him of adolescent visits to Rosemary Hall (a girls’ prep school), and he always expected to find himself making fudge in Alan’s room before the evening was over. While Dorothy could not avoid noticing people’s smirks, she never uttered a disrespectful word against Alan. That began to change as she turned on him the full force of her abuse, both to his face and behind his back. She knew his vulnerable spots better than anyone and quickly hit pay dirt.
Suddenly there were belittling references to Alan’s stage career. She would ask friends if they had ever seen Alan act. Never, she declared, had he appeared on a Broadway stage without a tennis racquet or a lime squash in his hands. Seeing him perform, she said, was like watching a Vassar girl whose coiffure seemed on the verge of collapse at any moment. In this way, she announced that criticisms of Alan could thenceforth be expressed openly, that she would in fact welcome them. When a friend admitted that Alan made her nervous, Dorothy promptly replied that she would be psychotic if he didn’t.
Dorothy had a number of homosexual friends. Although presumed to be tolerant, she was secretly prejudiced and enjoyed making caustic remarks at their expense. Around lesbians, her ragging tended to be easygoing. During a dinner in Paris with Janet Flanner and her friends, the subject of legal marriage had come up. When asked for her opinion, Dorothy nodded sympathetically. Lesbians should have the legal right to marry, she said, because the children had to be considered. Far less tolerant of males, she took gleeful pleasure in being mean: “Scratch an actor and find an actress.” Now, searching for the worst insult for Alan, she began to insinuate that he was a homosexual.
At a dinner party in Bucks County, she held out her hands in a dramatic gesture of defeat and announced loudly, “What am I doing with him? He’s as queer as a goat.” Albert Hackett heard her say, “What am I doing in Hollywood at my age and married to a fairy?” She hadn’t been at one of Charles Brackett’s Sunday brunches ten minutes before she noticed Alan in conversation with a group of young men at the bar and muttered: “It’s the curved lips of those boys that’s got him so interested.” Growing reckless, she devastated her mother-in-law by inquiring, “Where’s my homo husband?” When Dorothy was not referring to Alan as “that pansy,” she was only slightly less vituperative and called him “that shit” or “that man.” Said Ruth Goetz, “In the beginning she was sweet and tender with Alan, but as life wore on, she found his mannerisms immensely irritating. He embarrassed her. And the more embarrassed and the angrier she got, the more she drank.”
Very likely her accusations were unjustified. Although Alan had mannerisms that might have been considered feminine, never at any time was he known to have a sexual relationship with a man. Nevertheless, some of their friends now began to take Dorothy’s word for Alan’s homosexuality or bisexuality, whether they saw evidence of it or not. They assumed that somewhere in his past, if not his present, there must have been male lovers.
Dorothy did not really believe that Alan was sneaking off to sleep with men. Presumably, what she meant to convey was that he no longer wished to sleep with her.
Alan remained stoic. Whenever guests came over, setting the stage for an evening of drinking and providing an audience for Dorothy’s attacks, he faithfully concocted his secret-recipe canapés and served shakers of tequila cocktails. Dorothy’s acrimonious stories about him brought a smile to his lips.
They constantly saw Sid and Laura Perelman, who took great pleasure in gossiping about the Campbells. Sid, well known for his hostility toward homosexuals, referred to Alan as “that fag,” although it is striking how much time he spent with the Campbells. He insisted this was Laura’s fault, for it was she who felt life in Hollywood would be unbearable without Dorothy and Alan. Perelman functioned as a West Coast news agency speeding the latest dispatches back to the Goetzes in Keller’s Church:Dotty has been heard to say very freely that this is the end, etc., etc. I am sure you were with us, in spirit at least, one evening not long ago when we spent an evening with them and Janet Flanner and a group of spectacular bull-dikers of the Elsa Maxwell set. The talk was strictly concerned with H.R.H. the Nizam of Hyderabad who dresses up as a faun in a t
iger-skin and chases his cicisbeos around the conservatory with bull-whips. Alan was in a sheer tizzy, and although the figures have not yet come in from the outlying districts, on dit he came three times.
Dorothy and Alan must have enjoyed extending the privilege of house seats at their arguments to the Perelmans as much as Laura and Sid liked serving as their audience. Certain caustic scenes tended to be routine curtain-raisers: Alan’s nagging about money, Dorothy’s insistence they could live on the farm for ten thousand dollars a year if he fired his secretary. Alan could not believe she wanted to live at Fox House year-round; it had no heated swimming pool.
Like many who live with alcoholics, Alan had a large capacity for accepting abuse. As a child, he had perfected the skill of smiling his gorgeous white smile—there is not a single unsmiling photograph—and he reacted to Dorothy’s assaults with performances of Oscar-winning quality. Adopting a common steam valve, he complained incessantly about how badly Dorothy treated him, but he did not consider leaving her. Some wondered why. Ruth Goetz called him “that poor bastard. Believe me, his life was not an easy one. She simply crucified him.” Sid Perelman, speculating about when Alan would “beat the living urine” out of his wife, waited for him to snap.
Dorothy’s politics had no effect whatsoever on her screen writing because, contrary to the later claims of the House Un-American Activities Committee, it was virtually impossible for any individual writer to inject messages, subversive or otherwise, into a Hollywood picture. Even if she had contemplated such an idea, Alan would never have allowed any step that might threaten their livelihood. Hollywood wealth had become necessary to support their scale of living.
Communism did have a prominent influence on her creative work, what little there was of it at this period. By now, with great relief, she had given up writing verse. She had chafed under the charge that she was a second-rate Edna St. Vincent Millay, an accusation that she was all too ready to accept as true. She bitterly described herself later as a person who had slogged along in Millay’s footsteps “unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.” She was the first to call attention to her failure as a serious poet, insisting that her verse was bad because it had been fashionable.
In the late thirties, she continued to write fiction, and it was into this work that the Communist Party philosophy marched in heavy boots. Editors like Harold Ross were appalled.
After the publication of “Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street” in 1934, three years passed before she completed another story for The New Yorker. Although she had never been a prolific contributor, three years between submissions was an unusually long interval. When she finally did offer a story, it was heavily laced with the Party line and not particularly successful. Unlike Budd Schulberg, whose novel What Makes Sammy Run? was attacked by the Party for being insufficiently proletarian, a criticism that led to his dropping out of the C.P., Dorothy had no conflicts over artistic integrity. Without prompting, she was inspired to produce dutifully proletarian stories. “Clothe the Naked” is a dull, heavy-handed manifesto: Big Lannie, an impoverished black laundress who does washing for “secure and leisured” white matrons, is raising her blind grandson, Raymond. When Big Lannie dresses the boy in cast-off clothing she has begged from an employer, an elegant suit and pair of shoes that had belonged to Mrs. Ewing’s husband, he goes outside for a promenade in the grand clothing and is almost beaten to death by white workmen.
Dorothy’s best work was inspired by her own experiences: the urban, after-dark landscape she shared with Hazel Morse in “Big Blonde”—smoke-filled speakeasies, moneyed men, Scotch, and the inevitable nightcap of Veronal. Both Dorothy and Hazel employed black maids who could be counted on to rescue them when they had overdosed on sleeping powders. Dorothy, being neither black nor southern, a laundress nor a grandmother, knew practically nothing about Big Lannie, except what she could imagine, which was not a great deal.
The New Yorker rejected “Clothe the Naked.” It was the first submission of Dorothy’s that Harold Ross had turned down since the magazine’s beginning, and he apparently had difficulty informing her of his decision. She was, after all, among the four or five writers who had, as Brendan Gill has noted, “helped to invent what the world came to call the ‘New Yorker’ short story....” Unsure how to proceed, Ross talked the problem over with Harold Guinzburg, who advised waiting before either of them notified Dorothy. The blow would be softened if Guinzburg could tell her it had been sold to another magazine. When he submitted the story to Harper’s, the story was turned down again.
Meanwhile, a month had passed and Dorothy was getting worried. She fumed at Ross’s silence. It took the magazine three weeks to reject stories by mediocrities, she complained, and they might at least extend her the same courtesy. Her mood was not improved by the publication of a nasty profile in Cue magazine, which might have been libelous had it not been so accurate. Clearly, her so-called friends in New York had been blabbing because there were references to Ed Parker’s suicide attempts, John Gilbert’s sexual rejection of her (she was quoted as having said Gilbert was “a dear but he never wants to go to bed”), and it also recalled various humiliations at the hands of John McClain. Someone she knew had betrayed her.
Alan wrote secretly to Guinzburg and asked him to get in touch with Dorothy at once. By now, Guinzburg had been able to place “Clothe the Naked” with Scribner’s and was able to present Dorothy with pleasant news. From the beginning of their association, he had adopted a protective attitude. Over the years, he had grown adept at handling her ego like a delicate icon. Neglecting to mention the Harper’s rejection, he told her the story didn’t really belong in The New Yorker and insisted it was good business for her work to appear in a first-class literary magazine like Scribner’s, “in order to get away from the widely-held notion that you write only for the New Yorker, live at the Algonquin, and associate only with Woollcott and Ferber.” He apologized for Scribner’s “measly” two hundred and fifty dollars.
To Alan, Guinzburg wrote privately that “there is something wrong with the story, and I think I know what it is.” Although the weakness was obvious—indigestible propaganda cooked too little to become art—Guinzburg could not bring himself to name the flaw and lamely told Alan that the story’s ending was not strong enough to justify the buildup of anticipation throughout the piece. This is a curious conclusion since part of the story’s failure is that its violent conclusion seems too strong for everything that has preceded it.
After rejecting “Clothe the Naked,” Harold Ross grew increasingly suspicious of Dorothy as a writer. In some ways he had never trusted her and once referred to her, with an affectionate smile, as an alley cat. When James Thurber had been an editor at The New Yorker, Ross cautioned him to keep an eye on Dorothy because she inserted double meanings into her copy to embarrass him. He warned Thurber to query everything. Now he was on the lookout in case she was plotting to slip Red propaganda into his magazine. Their twenty-year friendship seemed in danger of deteriorating completely. Writing in New Masses in 1939, Dorothy described an editor who had turned down a story about the Spanish war because it favored the Republicans. “God damn it,” he had said to her, “why can’t you be funny again?” This nameless editor was Ross.
In 1927, Ross had made no objection to printing “Arrangement in Black and White,” a story that dealt with racial prejudice, but the reason he had done so was not to his credit. He “thought it was a scream,” Dorothy recalled. That, she assured herself, made no difference so long as it got published. Ten years later, “I tried to use just the same technique with pieces about Loyalist Spain that I wanted to have published. It didn’t work; that’s all. Fun is fun, and all that, but ‘Loyalist’ has become a four-letter word to editors.” After returning from Spain, she submitted several stories to The New Yorker, only to see them rejected. If Ross could not take Dorothy seriously as a foe of international Fascism, she refused to acknowledge his policy that the magazine should not take political stands.
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Her pique at Ross ended when she sent him a spare report about some Loyalist soldiers on leave whom she and Alan had met in a Valencia café one Sunday evening. Dorothy had been drinking vermouth, the six soldiers ordered coffee, and she passed around a package of American cigarettes. Talking through an interpreter, the men told her they were farmers and the sons of farmers. “Their village,” she wrote, “was next to that one where the old men and the sick men and the women and children had gone, on a holiday, to the bullring; and the planes had come over and dropped bombs on the bullring, and the old men and the sick men and the women and the children were more than two hundred.” After the soldiers left the café, Dorothy was touched to learn that they had paid for her and Alan’s drinks. Although meeting the soldiers happened much as she described, she preferred to label “Soldiers of the Republic” as fiction. It was the best work she had done in years, an understated, powerful story that captures with tremendous clarity the life inside a crowded café where babies are still awake in the late evening and the death outside where bombs have fallen that morning in broad daylight. It transcends politics, which presumably was the reason Ross accepted it.
In its way, “Soldiers of the Republic” was as propagandist as “Clothe the Naked,” but it was superior artistically. The story was so widely praised after publication that Aleck Woollcott arranged for it to be reprinted as a pamphlet.