Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  Dorothy had no need of a pencil sharpener or an alcoholic radio announcer with a secret passion to write. At the same time, she could not deny that big, good-looking, available men were rare.

  There were quite a few raised eyebrows among Dorothy’s friends, who thought he was handsome—“a beautiful hunk of Victor Mature” said Bea Stewart—but not overly bright. Since he continued to wear his air-force shoes, they tagged him Li’l Abner, but the shoes had little to do with the nickname. Compared with Alan, Josh Logan said, “Ross Evans lacked talent, flair, and strength. Leaning against him must have been like leaning on a tower of Jell-0.” Yet Dorothy needed to touch him. “She was constantly pawing him, couldn’t keep her hands off him,” another friend noticed.

  Ross Evans, after graduating from Tenafly (New Jersey) High School, had worked as a messenger in the garment district before winning a swimming scholarship to Franklin and Marshall College, where he majored in English. He had married before the war but was now divorced. Unlike Alan, he had no interest in domesticity and thought of himself as an athlete, having once been diving champion at the Newark Athletic Club. He still had a muscular body, but liquor was beginning to take its toll.

  Since Ross was an agreeable drinking companion, Dorothy felt comfortable with him. He was soon living with her at the New Weston. She thought him splendidly masculine, well built, and sexy and looked forward to a refurbished sex life. At the outset, like a false springtime, there was a brief flurry of activity. Then weeks and sometimes months would pass without Evans’s exhibiting the slightest interest in sex, a not-unusual pattern with heavy drinkers. She took pleasure in publicly punishing him by announcing to a room full of guests at a party that “Rossie” would not sleep with her. She may not have been as troubled as she claimed. Late at night, engulfed in the pleasant fumes of Courvoisier, often falling into bed and passing out, she could not be bothered with sex either. When Evans did happen to be seized by an amorous urge, he sometimes acted on it forthwith, regardless of time and place. Once, while visiting friends, he began making love to Dorothy on their living room sofa. Dorothy thought it was funny, but apologized afterward to her red-faced hosts.

  Since Evans had an urgent need to see his name in lights, he kept pressuring her to work so that he might accumulate a few joint bylines. Dorothy was in no hurry to oblige. When Cosmopolitan magazine sent around a scout to see if she could be talked into writing a story, she invited Aaron Hotchner up for a drink, even though writing fiction for Cosmopolitan was hardly something she had been longing to do. Ross, definitely a participant in the negotiations, swaggered around making highballs, attempted to speak for both of them, and frequently used the pronoun we. There was no doubt that he was eager to accept the Cosmo proposition.

  Meanwhile, sophisticated in the ways of publishers demanding her blood, Dorothy was playing hard to get. She said that her writing joints had probably atrophied from disuse. As she began her third highball, she expressed doubt whether she could get back to the typewriter, it had been so long.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Evans piped up. “I’ll handle the typewriter.” The way he loomed over her, legs bent and chin thrust out, reminded Hotchner of a paratrooper standing at parade rest.

  Evans was absent the next time Hotchner came by to discuss his proposal. When he suggested having lunch downstairs in the dining room, Dorothy hesitated and explained that she was six months behind in her rent. She didn’t dare leave her room for fear of running into the manager. Hotchner, feeling sorry for her, promised protection and assurances that the lobby at noontime would no doubt be crowded. As they cruised by the reception desk, however, a voice called out, “Mrs. Parker! May we see you a moment?”

  Out bustled a receptionist who delivered a stack of uncollected mail, among which there turned out to be a check.

  In the dining room, the captain came to the table for their order four times. Dorothy downed three highballs before being forced to select a lunch that she did not eat. She asked Hotchner if Cosmopolitan would accept a dual byline and described Evans as a person who kept her from drinking while she worked. The story she outlined to Hotchner was about a newly married couple, recently returned from their honeymoon, who were hosting a dinner party for his friends. Throughout the evening, which would include an elaborate dinner followed by parlor games, one of the guests (a former mistress of the man’s) lengthily reveals to the wife that her husband’s first wife had killed herself. Hotchner, who was being paid a three-hundred-dollar bonus for each famous author he bagged, didn’t much care what the story was about so long as Dorothy delivered a publishable manuscript.

  If Dorothy had never before collaborated on a short story, neither had Evans ever written one. He proved to be a mediocre writer. Refusing to listen to her voice of experience, he plunged ahead like a maddened race-horse, with a predictable result. When “The Game” was finally pronounced finished by Evans, she felt like a Lhasa Apso who had just given birth to a Saint Bernard. She watched the great creature stagger to its feet and lumber off into the pages of the December 1948 Cosmopolitan. Except for perhaps the first few paragraphs, there was nothing about “The Game” that suggested its coauthor was Dorothy Parker.

  She had been pulling Hotchner’s leg with her tale of atrophied writing joints. The truth was, she had not been as idle as she pretended. The previous year she and Frank Cavett had concocted a film treatment about an alcoholic wife. John Howard Lawson had subsequently based a screenplay on the treatment for Universal. Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman was a female version of The Lost Weekend with Susan Hayward effectively playing the Ray Milland role. It won Dorothy and Cavett an Academy Award nomination in 1947 for best original story and Hayward a best actress nomination. Hollywood gossip said that the film was based on the life of Bing Crosby’s wife Dixie Lee, an impression that Dorothy did nothing to correct. Although Smash-Up lost the best story Oscar to Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street, it garnered exceptionally good reviews and served as an announcement in the picture business that Dorothy could still turn out quality work, with or without the slave-driving Alan Campbell.

  Throughout their screen-writing career, Dorothy and Alan had been represented by various Hollywood superagents like Leland Hayward and Zeppo Marx. In early 1948, mobilizing herself for action, Dorothy retained another top agent, Irving “Swifty” Lazar, to negotiate a contract for her at Twentieth Century-Fox. When she packed up and headed for the Coast, Ross Evans followed closely on her heels.

  Chateau Marmont is a bogus turreted castle on Sunset Boulevard, a bit seedy in appearance, but in 1947 even the Garden of Allah had begun to look arthritic. Dorothy settled snugly into California hotel life and spent the winter working on her play about the mad Mary Lamb. Recreating Charles and Mary Lamb and their friends, a collection of manic-depressive Bohemians that included Coleridge and a hopped-up De Quincey, was thoroughly enjoyable. All her characters had comforting habits—opium, laudanum, brandy, homicide—that she understood and respected. With a title inspired by the mythical shore where Shakespeare shipwrecked Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night, The Coast of Illyria was based on the tormented life of Mary Lamb, who had fatally wounded her mother by planting a kitchen knife in her chest during a psychotic episode, and on Mary’s brother, Charles. Despite a sprinkling of humorous lines (Wordsworth is described as being “up to his rump in sunsets”), the play drew mainly on Dorothy’s painful psychological relationship with Alan. On top of this personal memoir, she superimposed the lives of the early nineteenth-century siblings—a brother and sister who needed each other too desperately to ever separate, drifting toward destruction as the woman’s recurrent attacks of insanity push the man further into alcoholism, attacks that in the end assure her total derangement.

  In May 1948, she submitted the play to the Margo Jones repertory company in Dallas, a regional theater that presented quality productions of both new works and classics. It was July before she heard from Jones, a cautious response praising the play and expressing tentat
ive interest in producing it. A month later it was scheduled for the 1949 season and its authors advanced a $150 royalty against five percent of the gross. Dorothy felt idiotically happy.

  In 1948 and 1949, she attempted to recapture the success that she and Alan had achieved in Hollywood during the thirties. After her Oscar nomination for Smash-Up, she felt on top again. Suddenly there were job offers, money, a man. Lean times were over. Although Hollywood’s golden age was nearing its end, no one knew it. Television was not yet being taken seriously, and Hollywood remained the movie capital of the world as well as a writers’ fount of gold. Dorothy’s first assignment at Fox was to adapt Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan with Ross and Walter Reisch. Renamed The Fan, the picture was produced by Otto Preminger and starred George Sanders and Madeleine Carroll. Next, she turned her attention to an original screenplay called Rose-Lipped Girls, a title inspired by A. E. Housman’s poem. It was never sold. Aside from the title, nothing about this script survives. About the same time, MGM purchased one of her short stories, “The Standard of Living,” for twenty-five hundred dollars, and an independent producer optioned “Big Blonde,” to be filmed on location in New York’s garment center. Neither of these projects reached the screen.

  In collaboration with Evans at Fox, she worked on a Loretta Young-Celeste Holm comedy about two nuns, Come to the Stable, and several other pictures for which they received no credit. Referring to a film intended for Humphrey Bogart, Evans joked, “We rarely think about the picture but when we do we think that we brought it up to gutter-level.” Professionally and personally, Ross was content to accept second place, which enabled them to avoid some of the power struggles that had impaired Dorothy’s relationship with Alan toward the end.

  Dorothy had highly unrealistic expectations for The Coast of Illyria. In part these were fueled by Margo Jones, who praised it in terms usually reserved for events such as Halley’s comet. Not only did she predict a Broadway production, but she also practically promised its appearance at the Edinburgh Festival of Music and Drama with Flora Robson playing Mary Lamb. In letters to Dorothy and Ross, she addressed them as “you two cuties,” “you babies,” and similar terms of flattering endearment, a personal style that made Dorothy hyperventilate. Nevertheless, she was an old hand at playing this game and sent sweet replies. “Now we know that everything people who know you have said about you is true,” she purred, a statement open to more than one reading, and she assured Jones that when they finally met she would no doubt “hug you to death.”

  The Coast of Illyria opened in April 1949, for a three-week run. Arriving for the opening, Dorothy was an object of curiosity for actors and audiences alike. During intermissions, she fled the theater. She hated people coming up to her, and atheist that she was, acknowledged compliments by grunting, “Bless you,” so that she would appear friendly. At the curtain, she received a standing ovation. “Cries for author were universal and genuine. A shaky Miss Parker and a pale Mr. Evans arose from sheltered corner seats in Section B,” the Dallas Morning News reported. Ross, who had thus far seemed content to be treated as Dorothy’s luggage bearer, babbled to a Time reporter: “We’ve tasted blood. We don’t want to do anything ever again except write for the theater.” Dallas critics called Illyria the best play of the season and compared it favorably to Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, which had also received its premiere by Margo Jones.

  When Dorothy returned to Hollywood, her moment in the sun over, it was to the heat of a California summer at the Chateau Marmont. Weekends, she and Evans drove to Malibu or Arrowhead, but mostly their life settled into a routine: studio jobs, revisions on The Coast of Illyria, discussion of ideas for another play, a modern work this time because she didn’t want to be typecast as writing exclusively about the Romantics. By now, there had been an addition to their household, a boxer named Flic, who was a few months old when they got him. Flic turned out to be an affectionate but timid animal who was terrified of just about everybody and everything. Dorothy, giving him the benefit of the doubt, decided that he must have been mistreated by his previous owners and began a program of assertive-ness training. It didn’t work. Norman Mailer urged her to bring Flic over to meet his dog, a large, black, ferocious German shepherd, apparently on the theory that if Flic could manage to make friends with Karl, he would be cured. Dorothy admired Mailer’s best-selling The Naked and the Dead. When he sought her out upon his arrival in Los Angeles that summer, she had found the young war novelist and his pregnant wife, Beatrice, to be amusing company. Mailer, exhibitionist as only an insecure, twenty-six-year-old first novelist can be, seemed pathetically eager to be liked. Not so with Karl, whom Dorothy and Ross agreed had a shifty look. She doubted that a confrontation would be a good idea. Mailer said she overestimated the danger and assured her that Karl would behave himself.

  When Dorothy and Ross drove up to Mailer’s house, Flic must have caught a whiff of Karl because he seemed reluctant to leave the car. When they finally persuaded him to enter the living room, he immediately urinated on the carpet. Everyone could hear Karl breathing noisily in another part of the house. Dorothy, nervous, got ready to bolt, but Mailer swore he could control the situation.

  At last Karl was led out on a leash. Advancing pleasantly, he first eyeballed Flic and sniffed his nose. Then he exploded like a bursting watermelon, his fleshy pink jaws spraying streams of spittle. As Mailer wrestled Karl back to a bedroom, Ross tried to quiet the petrified Flic and got his finger bitten.

  As they were getting ready to drive off, Dorothy watched Mailer come scampering after them, shouting and waving his arms. Although outraged, she forced herself to speak. “I said it wouldn’t work,” she told him. Mailer said that he was sorry, but he did not look contrite. It would be nine years before she saw him again, and then she would remember only the harrowing encounter with his dog. In her eyes there was nothing he could do to redeem himself.

  During the summer Dorothy was forced to cut back her drinking. Ruth Goetz, in Hollywood with Gus to write a film adaptation of their successful Broadway play The Heiress, remembers Dorothy’s entrance to a party at their house. She fell flat on her face in the hall and had to be scraped up and carried out feet first. In poor health, she suffered from back pains that sapped her strength and caused her to hobble around “bent and bitter.” Admitted to the hospital for tests and X-rays, she was treated by a doctor who lectured her about excessive drinking. “One of her doctors,” Ross Evans reported to Margo Jones, “said he didn’t like her kidneys and she later confessed that she didn’t like his nose.”

  Bit by bit Dorothy resigned herself to the fact that The Coast of Illyria would go to neither Broadway nor Edinburgh, although it was a bitter truth to accept. In due course, this failure affected her relations with Ross, who turned moody and talked about wanting peace and quiet. She felt that if their life were much quieter they would be in a coma.

  Evans suggested they leave Hollywood. Fearful of electricity in general and electrical appliances in particular, he proposed they relocate in a country where neither was highly regarded, nor continuously available. In Mexico, he promised Dorothy, they would be able to write creatively and live cheaply. He began to promote a town south of Mexico City, Cuernavaca, which had a semitropical climate year-round, sounded suitably exotic, and enjoyed popularity with American tourists. Before many weeks had passed, Ross’s imagination had transformed Cuernavaca into the promised land. When his nagging could be ignored no longer, Dorothy condescended to spending a month’s vacation in Mexico.

  In March 1950, they rolled south in Evans’s dusty De Soto, with the sleeping boxer sprawled across the backseat. The trip was notable for its unfriendliness. Dorothy clothed herself in her grand-duchess disguise, and Evans did an outstanding imitation of Abner Yokum. When they arrived at the plaza in Cuernavaca, Dorothy climbed out of the car and gazed around sourly.

  They rented a house on the outskirts of town for three hundred pesos a month, a bargain that Dorothy scarcely a
ppreciated. Nor did she find the local culture as entrancing as Ross did. There was a melancholy cathedral, a single movie theater showing endless Cantinflas films, and several dinky outdoor cafés whose tables were monopolized by Americans wearing unattractive beards. She ran into a few Hollywood acquaintances who were staying at the hotels. She also looked up Martha Gellhorn, who, now divorced from Hemingway, was living there with her adopted son.

  Certain activities taking place in Cuernavaca that spring would have interested Dorothy a great deal had she known of them at the time. One of the residents there was busily keeping tabs on her for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, though spotty investigation turned up very little of import. The informer was able to find out, for example, the amount of rent Dorothy paid for the house but not Ross Evans’s name. The report refers to him only as “an American writer of the male sex.” According to this document, which was added to her ever-growing file, “In Cuernavaca she is not known to have placed herself in contact with Mexican Communists but according to xxxxxxxxxxxx [name deleted by FBI] PARKER is in contact with various Spanish refugees who reside in Cuernavaca; however, PARKER does not speak Spanish and it is not believed that these contacts are very intensive.”

  Dorothy found living in Cuernavaca stupendously monotonous. To make matters worse, after five or six weeks had gone by, she noticed Ross paying excessive attention to a woman who owned a dress shop in town. Jealous, eager for a bit of drama, she protested angrily, but he said nothing. When she threatened to leave, he answered that she could go that very day if she liked.

  At the airport in Mexico City, a surly Ross stopped at the terminal entrance just long enough for Dorothy to scramble out before he gunned the De Soto’s motor and pointed it back toward Cuernavaca. He said later, “This so-called Land of Enchantment hardly amused Milady.” Too angry to ask where she was going, he assumed she was returning to “the land of milk and soundtracks,” but Dorothy purchased a ticket to New York.