Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  While working on The Ice Age, where homosexuality had been a central motif and she had revealed a predictable lack of sensitivity in her treatment of certain types of homosexuals, she was also writing “I Live on Your Visits,” which was published in The New Yorker in January 1955. Once again her preoccupation with homosexuality overflowed into her work. Inspired by observation of a friend’s relations with her sons, the story was primarily about the sterile life of an alcoholic divorcee who lives vicariously on the visits of an adolescent son now making his home with his father and stepmother. Dorothy must have been privately appalled, because she was pitiless in exposing her friend as a drunken mother who inflicts untold damage on her child. For comic relief, however, Dorothy could not resist adding a peripheral character who drifts in and out of the story, a character whom editor William Maxwell described as “a chatterbox homosexual queen, well along in years and terribly amusing, a perfectly standard character that everybody would now recognize. My superiors stuck at the idea of writing about such a person.” He was instructed to inform Dorothy that the magazine would not publish the story unless the homosexual was removed. “She agreed to this, reluctantly, and probably only because she was in need of money,” said Maxwell. She certainly needed money, but her greater need was to publish fiction again. The story as printed suffers from monotonous repetition in showing the mother’s unconscious cruelty. While it did not require a homosexual character, it needed a counterpoint to dilute the intensity of Dorothy’s painful portrait of the mother and son. Her instinct was essentially correct.

  The New Yorker published two additional stories. “Lolita” (1955) concerns the necessity for escaping from the type of possessive, manipulating mother whom Dorothy had written about in her two recent plays and in “I Live on Your Visits.” In this case, she made the child a daughter, a plain, thoroughly undistinguished young woman who extricates herself from her mother by marrying a man who is successful, handsome, and very much in love with her. Lolita’s mother, having happily concluded that her duckling daughter will never attract a man, is bewildered and jealous. Her only comfort is the hope that someday John Marble will leave Lolita, and she will be forced to return home.

  In “Lolita,” for the first time, Dorothy departed from her usual technique by writing entirely in narrative. Her previous fiction had always relied heavily on telling a story through what people said to each other, her ear for recreating such conversations being uncanny. “I haven’t got a visual mind. I hear things.” In 1955, she vowed, “I’m not going to do those he-said she-said things any more, they’re over, honey, they’re over. I want to do the story that only can be told in the narrative form, and though they’re going to scream about the rent, I’m going to do it.” But her experimentation with the all-narrative form was short-lived because in her next story, “The Banquet of Crow,” her scathing picture of a couple like the d’Usseaus, she returned to dialogue.

  Throughout the fifties, Dorothy’s relations with The New Yorker underwent a change. She ceased to feel a personal attachment to the magazine after Harold Ross died of cancer in 1951 and was succeeded as editor by William Shawn. Now she regarded the publication as she did any other. In her dealings with William Maxwell, she adopted a manner that he described as “very solicitous and motherly. It was unnerving.” He felt that her current work lacked the sharp vernacular quality that once had distinguished her fiction. “Her style had become heavily mannered and grew more and more like a fictional King James Bible.”

  Dorothy’s next—and last—story was written in the stately style that made Maxwell uncomfortable. In “The Bolt Behind the Blue” (1958), an unmarried secretary who is poor and plain finds herself philanthropically befriended by a rich woman. Mary Nicholl is invited to Alicia Hazleton’s home for cocktails, but never for dinners, so that Alicia can show off her house and her glamorous wardrobe. The story is a study in female pretense and self-deception with the secretary swearing after she leaves that she wouldn’t trade places with the rich woman for anything on earth, and Alicia Hazleton declaring she would be delighted to exchange. It was amazing, the narrator observed, that a bolt did not swoop from the sky and strike down both of them. Around this time, Dorothy complained to James Thurber and Edmund Wilson that The New Yorker had been rejecting her stories lately and possibly it is this one she meant. At any rate, it was published instead in Esquire, where she recently had begun writing a monthly column and was establishing a close personal relationship with publisher Arnold Gingrich.

  In January 1957, The New York Times asked Dorothy to review Sid Perelman’s latest book, The Road to Miltown, a piece that appeared prominently on the front page of the Book Review. It caught the eye of Harold Hayes, a young editor at Esquire who had long been a fan of hers. “Seeing the review made me wonder why I hadn’t read anything by her lately. So I tracked her down to the Volney and asked her to do something for us.” The assignment was a year-end round-up of notable books. On the strength of that article, the magazine offered her the position of regular book columnist beginning with the April 1958 issue, an honored spot that once had been occupied by writers such as Sinclair Lewis, James T. Farrell, and William Lyon Phelps. While Esquire was less familiar to her than The New Yorker, she had known Arnold Gingrich since the thirties and his wife, Jane, even longer than that, and she immediately felt at home as a contributor. Said Harold Hayes, “She was precious to the magazine, which had been going through a fairly fallow period and was just starting to come alive again. If Esquire was being seen anew, Dorothy Parker was one of the reasons. Whereas she may not have regarded writing the column as a great literary period in her career, her doing it was one of the great things happening to us.”

  Esquire gave her the first financial security she had enjoyed since the 1930s. She was paid six hundred dollars a month, with raises until the figure eventually reached seven hundred and fifty, and she could count on a check even when she missed a column. There were times when Harold Hayes found it necessary to issue a delicate reminder that the deadline was approaching or make last-minute trips to the Volney to collect the column. She was charmed by the young North Carolinian who always treated her like a lace doily, understood that “she had a miserable time writing,” and gave her full credit for being, as he said, “one of the major writers in the country, in my mind.” With Hayes she allowed herself to act playful, even a bit flirtatious. One day when he telephoned to compliment her on a column, she trilled happily, “Will you marry me?” Hayes knew that she drank because sometimes on the telephone her articulation was distorted. This distressed him because “she was an elderly lady. But I certainly never considered her a drunk. Occasionally she just would have a little too much to drink—I think the old-fashioned word is tipsy.”

  During her five years as Esquire’s book reviewer, Dorothy wrote forty-six columns and reviewed more than two hundred books, a tremendous output for her but a lot less than Arnold Gingrich would have liked. Having lured her to his magazine, he continually badgered her to write more pieces—a retrospective of the Jazz Age or a piece on speakeasies, he suggested—and Dorothy politely agreed these would make splendid subjects. She hooted at his notion that the twenties had been glamorous and proposed a title that she thought was honest: “The Dingy Decade.” But, recalled Gingrich, “it was so hard getting her regular columns out of her with anything reasonably resembling regularity that I never did have much hope of our getting the extra piece.” The only bonus she gave him was her short story, “The Bolt Behind the Blue.”

  At first she struggled hard to meet deadlines, but then she could not resist playing games, perhaps unconsciously withholding copy so that she would hear from Hayes or from fiction editor Rust Hills whose name tickled her (she said it conjured up images of New Jersey suburbs), one or the other of whom might rush up to the Volney to pick up her column. More frequently, she was tardy because reading the books became a grinding effort, aside from the fact that she hated writing. The longer she sat at her typewriter, the mor
e paralyzed she became. Gingrich recognized this problem and before long thought of her writer’s block as a complicated case of childbirth. He viewed his own job as obstetrics, and often referred to the monthly operation as a “high-forceps delivery.” Not that forceps always worked, but his success rate at prying copy from her beat all other publishers. There were those who believed that not even a cesarean section could make Dorothy meet a writing deadline.

  Aside from Gingrich’s generosity about money, he rose to her defense whenever asked why he had hired a blacklisted writer, although it was unlikely she knew about the mail that attacked Esquire for publishing her. Would he, a reader asked, employ a Nazi storm trooper for an editorial position? Then why was he hiring a Communist? Gingrich replied curtly that he knew nothing of Dorothy’s private life, but judging by her writings for Esquire, if she was a Communist, then the late Senator Robert Taft was a dangerous radical and so was his father.

  Arnold Gingrich was not the only person looking out for her welfare. Among those aware of her precarious financial position, nobody was more determined for her to have a decent income than Leah Salisbury, the formidable literary agent who made a point of inventing fresh angles so that Dorothy might profit from the work she had produced during her lifetime. Although she had used topflight movie agents to obtain screen assignments, she never had a literary agent until 1952 because she held them in low esteem. She acquired Salisbury by chance. Her client list included the Perelmans, the Goetzes, the Hacketts, and Arnaud d‘Usseau. When d’Usseau and Dorothy began to collaborate, it seemed logical for Salisbury to represent both of them in negotiations with theatrical producers. After the partnership ended, Salisbury continued to handle Dorothy’s professional affairs.

  The sad truth was that after forty years as a writer she owned practically nothing tangible to show for it. All the money earned in Hollywood and from her collected works had vanished. She had been imprudent when it came to investing—she dreaded thinking about the future let alone planning for it—but that did not mean she took responsibility for her present circumstances. In 1958, she was sixty-five, an age when most people look forward to retirement. She felt that everyone expected her to toil until she sunk in her tracks like a creaking plowhorse. Although the prospect was horrible, she could not retire. She had no money.

  Dorothy observed happily as Leah Salisbury wheeled and dealed on her behalf. Salisbury did not hesitate to crack down on pirates, amateur or professional, who had long been in the habit of using Dorothy’s work for everything from high school dramatic productions to network television programs. Shutting down unauthorized productions and confiscating scripts and tape recordings, she warned violators that they would be lucky if Dorothy did not bring charges against them. Salisbury told Dorothy that if her material was to be adapted for the stage, it must be a first-class production that would bring her pride and happiness, in addition to the money. Dorothy agreed. Those who requested permission to adapt her stories and verse for the stage or screen were often sped on their ways with regrets that Miss Parker did not feel her material could be a success in the form they presented.

  With one hand Salisbury labored to transform old writings into current income, as when she sold René Clair the film rights to “Here We Are” for four thousand dollars, and with the other she urged Dorothy to undertake new projects. As a result, Dorothy signed a contract with Bernard Geis Associates to write a biography of Ethel Barrymore, in collaboration with Barrymore’s son Samuel Colt. As the Geis press release announced, Dorothy’s insights into the distinguished actress would produce a lasting contribution to American letters. Bernard Geis admitted that the book, “never came close to transpiring.” Along with the Barrymore book, he also signed her to write her autobiography, a project that Leah Salisbury had been pressing her to consider. To Salisbury, it must have seemed that a memoir would be a fitting subject, not only in terms of public interest but also a book that Dorothy might be strongly motivated to complete. For all her respect for her client and a tolerance for eccentricities that sometimes verged on the saintly, Salisbury was not sufficiently familiar with Dorothy’s personal history to understand that the subject had been attempted fiction-ally in Sonnets in Suicide and ended in disaster.

  Dorothy confided in Quentin Reynolds that “rather than write my life story I would cut my throat with a dull knife.” Like some other authors, she considered publishers to be fair game, but, in this case, she must have felt guilty or sorry for Geis because she decided to return his advance. By the time she reached this decision, however, she had already spent a good deal of it. To show that she meant well, she sent a down payment on her debt. “Dear Bernie,” she wrote,

  This is, as you see, only a part of what I owe you for your advance. The book—oh, I can’t. I’ve tried and tried, I’ve gone away alone, I’ve done my damndest. But it doesn’t come—I’m sorry I have to pay you back in bits and pieces—but times are like that with me—Always with gratitude and affection—

  Whether she was referring to the Barrymore book or to her own memoir is irrelevant, for she could do neither. In the letter she enclosed a check for a tenth of the advance. Geis felt happy to write off the remaining ninety percent “to experience and to the privilege of being able to say I once almost published a book and a half by Dorothy Parker.”

  The following year, Salisbury tried to engineer another contract for Dorothy’s life with editor Lee Schryver at Doubleday, but by then the Parker reputation for ripping off publishing houses had grown, and Doubleday stipulated certain fail-safe conditions. Dorothy dragged her feet in signing a contract in which payments were contingent upon delivering sections of the manuscript. Finally, Doubleday gave up. Random House publisher Bennett Cerf severely criticized her for accepting advances on books that she had no intention of writing. He considered her behavior unprincipled.

  Salisbury remained undaunted. When Columbia Pictures approached her with the idea of making a film about Dorothy’s life, she gave serious attention to their proposal. The story editor at Columbia, thinking big bucks, reminded her about the financial success of such movies as The Jolson Story. Salisbury passed along the idea to Dorothy, who was in Martha’s Vineyard visiting Lillian Hellman.

  Dear Dorothy—

  Would you be interested in discussing a motion picture to be based on your wonderfully interesting life—don’t shoot me, I was asked and said I’d try to find out!

  Dorothy did not dignify the letter with a reply.

  Lillian Hellman was eager to venture onto the musical stage with an operetta based on Voltaire’s witty novel Candide. She wrote the book, Leonard Bernstein composed the score, and poet Richard Wilbur assumed chief responsibility for the lyrics. Initially, other lyrics were written by James Agee, followed by John Latouche. When he withdrew, Dorothy was invited to step in.

  “I had only one lyric in it.... Thank God I wasn’t there while it was going on. There were too many geniuses involved.” The show’s history did turn out to be chaotic. The story line underwent constant revisions, and Hellman produced a dozen versions before they got a satisfactory working script, but even then the operetta suffered from her heavy, pretentious book. Dorothy was irritated by Leonard Bernstein’s presumption that he knew how to write lyrics. She complained to Hellman that he clearly wanted to handle the whole show himself. Some years later, she was still shaking her head over his mania “to do everything and do it better than anybody, which he does, except for lyrics. The idea was, I think, to keep Voltaire, but they didn’t. But everyone ended up good friends except John Latouche, who died.”

  Her single contribution to Candide was the droll lyric for the song “Gavotte.” Leonard Bernstein recalled that Dorothy “was very sweet, very drunk, very forthcoming, very cooperative and, in sum, a dream to work with. I expected it would take weeks of visits and phone calls to get the lyric, but amazingly we had it the next day.” It is hard to imagine Dorothy writing anything overnight, but perhaps she did compose the lyric fairly quickly. The
tone of Madame Sofronia’s tabulating of her many woes echoes Dorothy in one of her Lord-how-I-pity-me moods:I’ve got troubles, as I said,

  Mother’s dying, Father’s dead.

  All my uncles are in jail.

  It’s a very moving tale.

  Sometimes she sounds as though she is mocking herself:Though our name, I say again, is

  Quite the proudest name in Venice,

  Our afflictions are so many,

  And we haven’t got a penny.

  In the end, though, Dorothy’s connection with Candide did nothing to enhance her reputation or to alter her penniless state. The show was, she thought, “so overproduced that you couldn’t tell what was going on at all.”

  Candide opened in December 1956. Despite the Bernstein score, a stunning production, and admiring reviews, the audiences stayed away and it closed after seventy-three performances.

  During the late 1950s, Dorothy finally began to reap long overdue professional rewards from the literary establishment. The National Institute of Arts and Letters had recently set up the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award to honor an older person who was not a member of the Institute for achievement and integrity. In 1958, its third year, the award went to Dorothy. Lillian Hellman had added her name to the list of contenders, which also included Dashiell Hammett that year. When Dorothy received notification of the award in a letter from Malcolm Cowley, then president of the Institute, she failed to acknowledge it for some reason. After friends advised her that it was proper to send a formal letter of acceptance, she felt mortified and immediately wrote to Cowley claiming that she had been “in a state of euphoric stupefaction, never pierced by the idea that I should have answered.” She wanted him to have her official reply, which was “Mr. Cowley—Good God, yes!” The award, incidentally, gave a cash prize of a thousand dollars.