Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  Alan took basic training at the Army Air Corps base in Miami Beach, where his barracks turned out to be a deluxe hotel that had been requisitioned for servicemen. Pulling KP duty in the dining hall, he was given the job of serving dessert to men coming through the chow line. One day while trying to spoon five canned cherries into each passing tin cup, he heard someone call him stingy and order him to pour in the whole can. Alan’s response was to hold up the line while he recounted to make sure he’d given the soldier no more than the regulation five. Glancing up, he was startled to see a familiar face, Broadway director Joshua Logan. Immediately Alan invited him to his room because he wanted to give him some ashtrays. Logan said he had no need of ashtrays, but Alan insisted. Everybody in Miami Beach needed ashtrays, and he had been saving these for friends. Logan, as it happened, was the first one to come along. After that, they became friendly, and before Alan knew it he was having a a good time. Miami Beach seemed like a huge Hollywood soundstage with fake palm trees and a Technicolor moon. The place was full of tall, skinny, suntanned men in starched uniforms who looked like Jimmy Stewart and boogiewoogied around Miami singing, chewing Wrigley’s, boozing, and living in comradely style in hotels that had colossal swimming pools and cocktail lounges full of girls with pompadours. The Army Air Corps, as anyone could plainly see, was a party, and Alan loved parties.

  In November, he wasted no time in applying for Officer Candidate School. Josh Logan, who had not initially wanted the responsibility of being an officer, changed his mind and applied as a gesture of friendship. They were both accepted. Right before OCS graduation, anticipating the revels ahead once they were officers and able to live as they pleased, they rented a small apartment across the street from their hotel and stocked it with food and liquor.

  Alan, quite popular in Squadron 24, soon won the reputation of being a wit. Practically nobody was aware that he was the husband of Dorothy Parker, and some had no idea who she was. Nor did they know or much care about his job in civilian life. During a physical examination that included a routine psychiatric interview, the doctor asked for his highest earnings as a civilian.

  “Five thousand dollars,” Alan said.

  “Five thousand dollars a year is all you made?” said the doctor.

  “Five thousand dollars a week.”

  The doctor stared a moment before asking, “Ever had any mental illness in the family?”

  Dorothy’s first reaction to Alan’s application to Officer Candidate School had been annoyance. When he had written to ask the birthplace of her father for the OCS application, she had gotten obstructive. Alan later recalled that “trying to get the little woman to write a letter stating any facts about her old man was a career in itself.” Prior to the service, Alan would not have dared call Dorothy “the little woman.” He was beginning to sound less and less like a man who seemed to be content bringing up the rear in his marriage and professional life. Dorothy noticed this with considerable misgiving.

  That fall she sped back and forth to Florida and parked there for a month in December. For all her good intentions, no new fiction got started, only a trite article for Mademoiselle urging its readers to become men for the duration and take the jobs left vacant by servicemen. She suggested, for example, that they drive buses, something she might have liked to do, just as she also talked about wanting to enlist in the WACs or become a war correspondent. These last ideas she mentioned so often that some people mistakenly concluded she had actually applied and been rejected as a premature antifascist.

  Waiting for the inspiration to begin another short story, she was dismayed to learn that Ruth Gordon was writing a play with main characters who bore an unmistakable resemblance to herself and Alan. The plot of Over Twenty-one concerns a famous novelist-screenwriter whose husband is struggling through Officer Candidate School at the age of thirty-nine and—the resemblance ends here—her determination to help him. This was the third time that Gordon played her, and Dorothy was getting tired of watching others profit from her life story. Even though she herself had practically elevated procrastination to an art form, she adopted an offended tone, snarling that she didn’t dare write a play about her life because Ruth would very likely sue her for plagiarism.

  Over Twenty-one opened on Broadway in January 1944. A great success, it was made into a film starring Irene Dunne.

  Just before Alan graduated from Officer Candidate School, he and Josh Logan organized a celebration for their friends at the rented apartment. Logan later figured their guests must have consumed more liquor than usually was drunk in all of Miami at the height of the tourist season. Unfortunately, he and Alan were scheduled to appear on a GI radio program the next morning. With Dorothy tottering along behind, they made their way to the station on one of the piers. Logan noticed that she looked wrecked—rheumy eyes, gray-green face, twitching cheeks. He felt sorry for her. Despite his preconceived notions about Dorothy’s being vitriolic, she seemed to him like “a beady-eyed dumpling” who needed care. Since fifteen minutes remained until air time, he offered to run back to one of the bars along the beach and get her anything she wished—“a double Scotch, a double rye, whatever. I might even find a bottle of gin.”

  Despite his promises, he found it impossible to get off the pier and returned from the expedition with the only beverage he was able to buy, a bottle of Coca-Cola with a straw in it.

  “How sweet,” Dorothy said. “Coca-Cola. I’ll try it. I’ve never had a Coca-Cola.” Accepting the soda, she sucked tentatively at the straw, then swallowed a larger slurp. Logan was anxious to know whether it was making her feel better.

  “No, but as it was going down I learned a deep, abiding truth about drinking Coca-Cola.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Never send a boy on a man’s errand.”

  Several weeks later, Dorothy was again in Miami when another verity appeared to her. She noticed that Alan seemed unusually distant. He no longer seemed interested in her, at least he was making no attempt to cater to her.

  Nedda Harrigan, Logan’s future wife, was also there for the weekend, and they had another party. This time Logan observed that Dorothy and Alan seemed tense and unhappy. “They were terribly intimate, only it wasn’t cozy or jolly, more like a couple of vipers. Of course we were all drinking heavily, because that was standard procedure in the air force, but she was in a bad temper and later on they had a terrible fistfight.”

  When Dorothy met Nedda Harrigan for lunch the next day, she had a black eye. Deeply humiliated, she refused to acknowledge the bruise and instead launched into an indignant recital of Alan’s misbehavior. He and Josh, she told Nedda bitterly, didn’t need them anymore because they had their war. She finally pointed to her face. “A beloved little mouse below my eye. That’s not very pretty, is it? Not very pretty at all.”

  Nedda Harrigan urged Dorothy not to take the quarrel seriously. War was difficult for everyone, and besides, they were all in the same boat.

  Dorothy disagreed. “My boat,” she insisted, “is leaking.”

  Violence had never entered her relationship with Alan. During the years when she had vilified him as a queer and a Vassar girl, he had mildly turned the other cheek, but he now fell on her in a fury. He reminded her that he had enlisted for her sake; now she was accusing him of desertion. No matter what he did, she was never satisfied.

  Dorothy took the train back to New York.

  In late January 1943, on a CBS radio broadcast, Aleck Woollcott was taking part in a discussion entitled “Is Germany Incurable?” when he pushed away from the microphone and printed on a scrap of paper, I AM SICK. A few hours later he was dead of a heart attack followed by a cerebral hemorrhage. Even though Dorothy had recently visited him in Lake Bomoseen and knew firsthand of his poor health, she still took it hard.

  On the evening of his death, she hurried to the Algonquin and sat in a corner with Bea Stewart and Joseph Hennessey, Woollcott’s secretary. She was annoyed to notice that others had the same idea. When Ge
orge and Beatrice Kaufman and a few more appeared, she nudged Bea. “We have the Round Table with us. Let’s get out of here.” A few days later, after a memorial service thronged by some five hundred of Woollcott’s friends, Dorothy joined the bereaved Round Tablers in the Rose Room for one last drink. Among those present were the Kaufmans, Neysa McMein, Peggy Leech, and several other ghosts from the past with whom she had fallen out over the years. Looking warily around, she saw people who had been her dearest companions in the old days, friends who never had been at a loss for words, but now there was uneasy silence. They had utterly nothing to say to each other. Harpo Marx found it equally eerie and recalled that “it was the last gathering of the Woollcott crowd, and it was our strangest gathering.”

  Shortly after this alarming reunion, Dorothy fled New York. Somerset Maugham had invited her to spend a few weeks in South Carolina, where he was living on the estate of his publisher, Nelson Doubleday. Dorothy made the mistake of accepting impulsively. It was a curious invitation because they barely knew each other. They had, in fact, met only once at a Hollywood dinner party given by Fanny Brice. Dorothy, seated next to Maugham, found herself feeling uncharacteristically intimidated and thought that “whenever I meet one of these Britishers I feel as if I have a papoose on my back.” When Maugham proposed she compose a poem for him, she cheerfully agreed to perform. A paper and pencil were requested and Dorothy wrote:Higgledy Piggledy, my white hen;

  She lays eggs for gentlemen.

  That was very nice, Maugham said. He had always liked those lines. Giving him a cool smile, she completed the verse:You cannot persuade her with gun or lariat

  To come across for the proletariat.

  Maugham chuckled with delight. There was no one around in South Carolina but Maugham and a number of sycophantic young men who were devoted to their host but regarded Dorothy with indifference. All Maugham wanted to do was play bridge. Although Dorothy later called him “that old lady” and “a crashing bore,” she concealed her ennui and her tongue. Feeling miserable anyway, she spent three weeks playing cards with Maugham. A year later, as if to prove that virtue does indeed have its own reward, Maugham wrote, for $250, a glowing introduction to her collected works, The Portable Dorothy Parker.

  Back in New York, her distress over Woollcott’s death failed to subside with time. More than two years later, when Samuel Hopkins Adams wrote a well-received biography of Woollcott, she felt sufficiently upset to offer a dissenting opinion. In an article for the Chicago Sun Book Week, she scorned the book as only sporadically accurate and said that she smelled “a strange little underlay of meanness all through it.” She went on to flay George Kaufman and Moss Hart for distorting Woollcott’s personality in their play The Man Who Came to Dinner, which was, she declared hotly, a “nasty little play.”

  In 1943, Woollcott had been fifty-six and Dorothy turned fifty. His early death does not seem extraordinary considering his obesity and accompanying ailments, but Dorothy refused to make such connections and felt shaken by what she considered his premature passing. With great reluctance, she had stopped pretending to be Alan’s age. Suddenly she regretted never having lied about her age. On the other hand, she joked, all she might have subtracted were three or four years and “what’s a couple of sandspits to an archipelago?”

  She disliked the bodily decay of aging, but the cause of her distress was far more complex: She was forced to reevaluate her thinking on death, a subject she had adopted long ago as her peculiar speciality. She did still enjoy making morbid wisecracks. She said she wanted a large, white tombstone because it would give her “something to live for.”

  She claimed it was the word middle in middle-age that she hated, because it branded her a frump. She wanted to skip her fifties and get to the seventies and eighties. “People ought to be one of two things, young or old. No; what’s the good of fooling? People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.” Suddenly the passage of time terrified her. She wondered if she really did seek death. She who had never feared death and had busily cultivated her demise was startled to realize a ghastly fact: She would not be around forever to carry on her flirtation with nonexistence. What she recognized was a truth about herself so depressing that it almost made her feel like killing herself.

  Woollcott’s death had angered and saddened her, but it was nothing compared to her acute shock in November 1945, when Robert Benchley died unexpectedly. Like Woollcott, he too was fifty-six. He had been visiting Gertrude in Scarsdale when he suffered a series of nosebleeds that could not be controlled. When Marc Connelly heard he had fallen into a coma, he hurried hatless and coatless to the Stork Club, a favorite saloon of Benchley’s, and rushed from table to table asking patrons for their blood types. Those whose blood type matched Benchley’s were immediately whisked off to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital to provide transfusions. Benchley died from a cerebral hemorrhage, complicated by cirrhosis of the liver.

  When she was notified of his death in Hollywood, Dorothy cried out, “That’s dandy!” Her words offended Gertrude Benchley, whose hostility toward Dorothy had remained strong. Misinterpreting her words as indifference, she never forgave her.

  Despite a breach after her marriage, Benchley remained one of the most important people in her life. She loved him in a special way. When Benchley’s son Nathaniel began collecting material for a biography of his father in the 1950s, she showed little interest in the project and cooperated minimally with requests for her recollections. Probably she was convinced that any authorized biography of Robert Benchley would be well sterilized.

  After Benchley’s death, John O’Hara decided that “the party was over,” which was not strictly true because it was already breaking up in 1929, not long after he arrived in New York. The Round Table’s legend was so powerful that the group was believed to be alive fifteen years after its demise. In the minds of the nostalgic, it lasted even longer.

  Whenever people asked Frank Case what had become of the Algonquin Round Table, he shrugged and replied, “What became of the reservoir at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street? These things do not last forever.” Edna Ferber realized the party was over when she arrived at the Rose Room in 1932 and found the big table occupied by a family from Newton, Kansas. Dorothy was happy to spread malicious stories about the Round Tablers. At her mildest, she described them as a pack of hypocrites and show-offs who “came there to be heard by one another. ‘Did you hear what I said last night?’ ”

  Still, the unexpected deaths of Woollcott and Benchley had a profound effect on her and on some of the others, perhaps because it brought them face to face with their own mortality and other disagreeable subjects. In 1919, young and unproved, their goal had been to have it all—love, money, fame, and happiness. Twenty-five years later, they were still hoping for happiness and wondering why fame had failed to satisfy. To their great shock, they now were reminded that it was quite possible to drop dead without finding it. In their time, no American had been more famous—and more unfulfilled—than Alexander Woollcott. Three decades later he was forgotten, “famous mostly for being famous,” as a critic aptly commented.

  Robert Benchley, beloved as he had been, had seen happiness elude him. He slumped into a decline before he died. Sleeping pills kept him awake at night, and the Benzedrine he took on the set made him sleepy. Finally, he gave up the Benzedrine because he could think of no important reason for wanting to be awake. Before the war, Dorothy had attended a Hollywood party where the guests had included Benchley and Robert Sherwood. Benchley went haywire. Pointing at Sherwood, who had recently won a second Pulitzer Prize for his drama Idiot’s Delight, he cringed in horror and cried out, “Those eyes—I can’t stand those eyes looking at me. He’s looking at me and thinking of how he knew me when I was going to be a great writer ... And he’s thinking now look at what I am.” Sherwood later admitted that those might very well have been his thoughts. When Harold Ross felt obliged to fire Benchley as The New Yorker theater critic, he deputized St. Clair McKelway
to deliver the bad news. Benchley, quickly sensing the reason for the meeting, told McKelway he understood perfectly and ordered another round of drinks.

  Many of those associated with the Round Table were destined to live shorter-than-average lives. Ring Lardner, suffering from alcoholism and tuberculosis, died of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight. During his last years his face resembled a skull, and his trembling fingers could not light a match. Ruth Hale died suddenly when she was forty-seven, and Heywood Broun followed her at fifty-one.

  Since all of them, with few exceptions, were what would now be termed substance abusers, the problems they suffered are not surprising. Although Dorothy was the only one to attempt suicide, the rest selected alternate roads to self-damage, just as Dorothy herself did in the latter part of her life. Woollcott gorged himself into his grave with an early-Renaissance appetite for mountainous quantities of food; he adored creamy, calorie-loaded cocktails (he claimed the Brandy Alexander was named for him) and drank untold cups of coffee, although during rare periods of moderation he cut down to nineteen cups a day.

  The others simply drank. Benchley’s friends choked when they watched him adding vodka to chocolate ice-cream sodas.

  “Bob,” Scott Fitzgerald said after he had gone on the wagon, “don’t you know that drinking is slow death?”

  Benchley had a ready answer. “So who’s in a hurry?”

  Charles MacArthur, despite a stable second marriage to the long-suffering Helen Hayes, died of an internal hemorrhage after being hospitalized for nephritis and anemia. He was sixty and looked eighty. Eventually Heywood Broun’s hands shook and his nose reddened, although during the years when he had sedated himself with a flask of warm gin, his alcoholism had not been particularly noticeable. John O’Hara had recurrent drinking problems. Edmund Wilson, who was hospitalized during periods of manic-depression, also was afflicted by alcoholism. Enthroned on a divan in the Algonquin lobby, he ordered double martinis or double bourbons one after another, conducted brilliant, completely coherent conversations, but sometimes fell flat on his face when he got up to leave.