by Marion Meade
The Viking Press was eager to publish a third volume of her collected fiction, but there was little to collect. Since After Such Pleasures, she had written only three stories. When Harold Guinzburg suggested padding with stories rejected from previous collections and with book reviews, Dorothy balked. She disliked nearly all her old work and stubbornly insisted that she wished to reprint nothing except “Soldiers of the Republic” and “Clothe the Naked.”
In an apologetic telegram, she ruled out the possibility of another book and asked his forgiveness. She said her stay in Hollywood had lasted too long, confessed that she felt FRIGHTENED BY THE PASSING OF TIME, and begged for news of her New York friends because IT IS GOOD TO HEAR OF REAL PEOPLE DOING FINE THINGS.
Guinzburg was sympathetic. If an author wished to use her talent doing missionary work, that was her business and he did not condemn her. Her political commitment was no doubt healthy, he replied, but it was irrelevant to commercial book publishing. He scolded her for remaining in Hollywood and succumbing to “the seductions of agents, producers, and others.” As an incentive, he predicted that a new collection of stories would probably earn at least ten thousand dollars in royalties, perhaps forgetting that she and Alan earned almost that much in a month.
Guinzburg, used to getting his own way, was relentless in his coaxing. In the following months he outmaneuvered her. Here Lies was finally published in April 1939. Dedicated to Lillian Hellman, it included “Soldiers of the Republic” and “Clothe the Naked,” as well as a new story she wrote especially for the collection. “The Custard Heart” attacked her wealthy bourgeois women friends who had failed to develop a political consciousness. The remaining twenty-one stories had appeared in earlier books. Although readers found little that was fresh, the book was praised by the critics and sold well. What Dorothy herself admired most about Here Lies was its title. She had wanted to use it for Not So Deep as a Well, but the book of verse had already been printed and Guinzburg had no intention of discarding an entire printing. He had sent her a gentle telegram: WE WOULD HAVE TWENTY THOUSAND BOOKS TO GIVE TO SALVATION ARMY AND THINK OF EFFECT OF THAT.
One of the many chores that Alan gladly took care of was answering Dorothy’s mail, even her correspondence with intimate friends. He signed the personal letters rather sweetly as “alandotty.” Once the marriage began to be troubled, she felt uncomfortable as half an “alandotty.” The more she relied on Alan, the more bitterly she resented him and the stronger became her denials that she needed him. She knew that some people believed her pathetic in this respect and could not help noticing their condescending smiles, even though she asked for their smiles by launching violent tirades against her husband.
Bridling at the funny way Lillian Hellman looked at her, she told her off, although she did it gently. She once looked up from a book she was reading and said to Hellman, “The man said he didn’t want to see her again. That night she tried to climb into the transom of his hotel room and got stuck at the hips. I’ve never got stuck at the hips, Lily, and I want you to remember that.” Precisely the opposite was true.
Suddenly, both she and Alan were eager to prove they could manage without the other. She was writing again. Within a matter of months, she completed “Song of the Shirt, 1941” and “The Standard of Living,” two fine stories that also pleased Harold Ross. In the summer of 1941, she traveled to New York without Alan, a trip that Robert Benchley described as “a friendly divergence.” She kept bellyaching about Hollywood and all her friends back in New York, he wrote,
until Alan suggested she go East and shut up for a while. So she did, and now calls up every day to fight over the phone and hint about coming back, having probably fought with all her Eastern pals. Alan told her he thought she had better stay there a little longer, as he had several jobs of his own to finish before he could team up with her again.
All of a sudden Alan began to assert himself. His confidence shot up when he got a string of assignments from RKO. Most of the scripts on which he worked without Dorothy were not produced, but he was hardly to blame for it. The important achievement was his salary—$1,250 a week.
Dorothy remained away nearly two months. She spent much of the time with Sara and Gerald Murphy at East Hampton, Long Island, and hardly any at Fox House, which she seemed reluctant to visit alone. The farm was isolated and she was used to Alan’s being there, tidying and fussing. While it gave her great pleasure to talk about old times with her friends and to feel she was in the middle of things again, she missed her husband and returned to Beverly Hills in July. On her birthday, she thought nostalgically of Harold Ross and mailed him an affectionate note: “Ah, look, dear Harold—today’s my birthday—Dorothy.”
Not too long afterward, Alfred Hitchcock engaged her to add choice material to a script already written by Peter Viertel and Joan Harrison. Saboteur is about an aircraft factory worker who is wrongfully accused of sabotage and includes a cross-country chase to apprehend the true criminal. Dorothy wrote the dialogue for a troupe of circus freaks—a bearded woman and Siamese twins. She and Hitchcock appear in the film together, as a couple driving along the highway in a car just as Robert Cummings is manhandling Priscilla Lane. “My,” Dorothy remarks, “they must be terribly in love.”
The rest of 1941 passed less pleasantly. Dorothy, in a sour mood, taunted Alan for enjoying Hollywood. She called his values low, trashy, and bourgeois, his principles “debased.” Remorseful, she later admitted that she had gone too far and “behaved like a shit to him,” but added tartly, “I had much right on my side, but I used all the wrong things.” Again they teamed together to work on a baseball film about Lou Gehrig, The Pride of the Yankees. They were making good money at the Goldwyn studio when Dorothy spied an opportunity to yank the rug from under Alan’s feet by getting herself dismissed from the picture. Figuring that “alan” without “dotty” would certainly have to take up begging at Hollywood and Vine, she sat back and waited for Goldwyn to fire Alan. It was a prospect that gave her great satisfaction, but something went wrong.
The studio decided to keep Alan and replace Dorothy with Helen Deutsch, a short-story writer and former newspaper reporter who was working in pictures for the first time. Deutsch had no idea what had preceded her arrival. “I was too green to know the score, although somebody told me that Dorothy Parker had got stinking drunk and had been taken off the picture. All I knew was that Alan Campbell was there every day and Parker wasn’t.” Alan, she decided, was “a cute guy but creepy”—he shaved after he arrived at the office and spent hours leaning out the window. When she noticed him watching the story editor, Deutsch wondered if “they weren’t a couple of homosexuals and Alan was in love with him.”
It pleased Dorothy to imagine herself as the victim in this situation. The studio had had the nerve to replace her with a pretty thirty-five-year-old unpracticed screenwriter who was making only three hundred dollars a week. Helen Deutsch was soon earning three thousand a week and she wrote a string of successful films including National Velvet, Lili, and I’ll Cry Tomorrow. Adopting an appropriately offended attitude, Dorothy began to imagine that Alan was having an affair with Helen Deutsch. Though not true in this case, she herself had always found creative collaboration impossible without sex. It seemed as likely a theory as any, and it gave her another reason to increase her consumption of brandy.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of war in December, Dorothy became increasingly difficult to live with. She began the day with a morning eye-opener and drank steadily until bedtime or a blackout, whichever happened to come first. Alan affected not to notice. Dorothy checked herself into a hospital to dry out. Alan’s uncharacteristic response contrasted with his habit of automatically jumping to her rescue, a reaction that in no way denoted acknowledgment of her alcoholism. In fact, the reverse was true. While he could hardly deny that sometimes she over-drank, he did not recognize it as an uncontrollable compulsion. He was unwilling to endorse her stopping and drank along with her so tha
t she might have company. Without meaning to, he encouraged her drinking with his collection of recipes for unusual cocktails, with expensive ice crushers and bar paraphernalia. Joseph Bryan cannot remember Dorothy ever preparing a drink for herself. “She would just hold out her glass, and Alan would jump up to refill it.”
Like many who live in alcoholic families, Alan found it natural to assume a custodial role. He accepted his wife’s tendency to overreact, feel sorry for herself, and embrace the victim’s role. Not only did he tolerate her selfishness, but also he shut his eyes when she showed indifference toward his interests. He was finally getting fed up. Nothing he did pleased her, and when he responded to her peevish moods with impatience she called him “a cross little man.”
While Dorothy was in the hospital, Laura and Sid Perelman busily carried olive branches between the warring parties:Our old friend Dotnick has been in something of a spin—loaded on brandy by eleven in the morning and the like. She clearly resents Alan working with Miss Helen Deutsch, she’s fed up with pictures and picture people, and by Thursday of this past week, she had got herself into such shape that she had to go off to a sanitarium for three or four days. All through this, Alan was phoning us at the studio and running in to our apartment biting his nails and telling us how unreasonable she was.
The Perelmans paid a call on Dorothy. Wan and sober, she announced her readiness to chuck the marriage and return to New York for good. They conveyed this threat to Alan, who predictably rushed to her side, humbled himself, and patched up the quarrel. “As of last night,” Sid notified the Goetzes, “they were home together again, but it’s hardly Paola [sic] and Francesca.”
Seeing them together brought to Sid Perelman’s mind the image of a cobra and a mongoose. It was more true than he realized. Ever since war had been declared, Dorothy had been testing Alan in new and provocative ways. To prove that he loved her, she wanted him to join the army. She had warned him a thousand times about the evils of Fascism. Now the whole world was in flames and “there were men getting their balls shot off, and here he was in Beverly Hills.” Were she a man, she knew that she would enlist. “She would say very rough things to him,” remembered a friend.
Her demand was outrageous because Alan, at thirty-eight, could easily have avoided serving in the armed forces. Despite his education at Virginia Military Institute, which had been Horte’s idea, he had always shown more interest in perfecting the art of making chocolate soufflés than in warfare. He made a confession to Dorothy: He had hated military school. After practically starving to death as an actor, he was now flourishing in his career as a screenwriter and had no desire to throw it away by joining the army.
Excuses like these made Dorothy livid. She was not suggesting he go to the Ukraine and join the Red Army, only to be a patriot and defend his country.
Alan, however, was oblivious to such taunts. He couldn’t go to war because he had to install a new chimney at Fox House, and that was that.
Throughout the winter of 1942, hectored almost without letup, Alan gnawed his already bitten fingernails and increased his drinking. Now that neither one seemed to be in control, some of their friends began avoiding them. Regular drinking companions like screenwriters Phoebe and Henry Ephron suddenly claimed to be spending a great deal of time in Palm Springs. Henry Ephron felt the Campbells were a bad influence. “We were working very hard and they would want to stop in every night to sit around and drink, then at the end of the evening we’d have to drive them and their car home. We just had to drop them. It came to a point where we’d put the cars in the garage and the lights out, so it would look as if we weren’t at home.”
But the Campbells were too absorbed in their own high drama to be hurt. Alan probably enjoyed the game as much as Dorothy. These months may well have been among the most spicy of their entire marriage. Tantalizing her, Alan told Dorothy about movie people who were being commissioned as majors or colonels and said that if he should ever decide to join up he would want a commission. This elitist idea sent Dorothy into a frenzy.
At last, in the spring of 1942, Alan made up his mind to enlist as a private. By now the battles they had waged on the subject were so plentiful that it was easy for Alan to forget that enlisting had been Dorothy’s idea. Wisely, his victorious wife did not remind him. She assured Aleck Woollcott that “no one had told him what was right, except himself,” that he had enlisted “without telling one soul.” This scenario may have fooled Woollcott, but those who knew better were incredulous. Dorothy, having got her way, full of respect for her husband, was feeling intensely satisfied. When she repeatedly spoke of how much she loved him, she meant it sincerely.
Alan’s plans stunned his mother. After confusing the issue by calling him heartless and inconsiderate, she rounded up a delegation of Point Pleasant matrons who descended on the farm like vigilantes to try to talk Alan out of leaving “that poor sick woman all alone.” When this failed, Horte faked a heart attack. Dorothy, furious, reminded herself that she had never been a vengeful woman. Her philosophy was that if you had patience “the bastards will get theirs and it will be fancier than anything you could ever have thought up. But I would ... give quite a large bit of my soul if something horrible would happen to that woman for poisoning Alan’s last days here.” Whether by “here” she meant Pipersville or the planet earth is ambiguous.
Among those praising Alan’s decision as deeply courageous was Gerald Murphy, who presented him with a wristwatch engraved with the admiring but melodramatic inscription, QUI SENSAT ACET [He who feels, acts].
This proved far too high-toned for Robert Benchley, who wisecracked that the watch should have read WHOSE WIFE FEELS, ACTS.
Chapter 15
THE LEAKING BOAT
1942-1947
In the first days of Alan’s absence, she attempted to minimize her loneliness by drawing closer to her family. She first called her sister, who was separated from her second husband and living with her daughter in East Patchogue, Long Island. Informed of Alan’s departure, Helen neglected to offer the sort of commiseration that Dorothy expected and instead reported how the war was affecting East Patchogue that summer. A few of the Saturday night dances had been canceled.
Dorothy next telephoned Bert, who still worked in the garment business as a dress salesman. When she dialed his home in Queens, she got her sister-in-law. Mate affected to find nothing exceptionable about Alan’s enlistment because, she explained, he was a college graduate. Her son Bertram, only a year younger than Alan, would like to train in aviation, but had no college degree. When Dorothy interrupted to say that Alan had enlisted as a private, Mate changed the subject. By the time Dorothy hung up, she was cursing to herself.
Despite her fame, there had been no real alteration in the Rothschild family roles over the years. To them, she was still the clever little sister, a source of pride and pleasure. Dorothy, for her part, continued to scorn their tributes on the grounds that they could not be trusted to judge her worth or even to fathom her thinking. Despite her complaints about the Rothschilds, she in fact considered Bert “not bad,” actually high praise from her, and she expressed her deep-rooted affection for Helen by her usual generosity. Her niece Lel recalled that, whenever she visited the
Algonquin as a child, her mother would warn her “not to admire anything Aunt Dot is wearing because she’ll take it off her back and give it to you.” During Lei’s adolescence, Dorothy bought her a squirrel coat. On her marriage to Robert Iveson, she gave her the Cartier diamond watch that once had been a gift from Seward Collins. (The watch, now owned by Lel’s daughter Nancy Arcaro, has become a family heirloom.)
Failing to find comfort in her family, Dorothy holed up at Fox House to redesign a life without Alan. She was determined to pull her socks up and prove her competency: “I’ve got to write a lot of stories—if, of course, I can. I’ve got the farm to keep going. I’ve got myself. I’ve got Alan’s mother.” It occurred to her that she should undertake some kind of factory work, perhaps
welding, but quickly abandoned the idea as impractical. Still, a nine-to-five civilian job remained a possibility, a position like the one she had at Vanity Fair during the last war, when a regular routine had helped pass the time. Before Alan left, he strongly advised against her living at the farm because anyone “who cannot drive a car, much less make coffee” would be better off in Manhattan. He spoke to a friend who managed the luxurious Ritz Hotel about giving her a good rate on a suite. Even if she did take a place in town, she wrote Woollcott, she intended to make periodical visits to Pipersville as often as the hired man could spare the gas to meet her at the station.
Mapping out a strategy was simple. Living it was harder. In mid-September, after moving to the Ritz, she telephoned Harold Ross to ask for a job. Not a writing assignment, she explained, but a staff position. While Ross was struggling to comprehend the idea, which he did not for a moment take seriously, she went on to say that she was living at the Ritz, and she argued that it was costly but not unreasonably so, indeed there were hidden benefits that actually made it a bargain. Her logic must have struck him as sounding like a miracle on the order of the fishes and the loaves, and since publishing a weekly magazine on a shoestring always had meant looking for “Jesuses” who might save his operation, he pricked up his ears. He later joked to Marc Connelly about making her head of the design and layout department. He heard nothing further from her. When he subsequently telephoned the Ritz, he never found her in, for the good reason that she was seldom there.