Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  Dorothy resigned herself to Lillian’s restrictions. If Lilly sometimes treated her as if she were practically toothless, she managed to overlook that too. Over the years, their friendship had undergone considerable evolution as their importance in the world had somersaulted. Now it was Hellman who glittered as a literary big shot surrounded by sycophants, her bank balance bursting with the fruits of success, while Dorothy stood hungrily in the shadows.

  In the early fifties, Hellman wrote a short story, a clear invasion of Dorothy’s province, and presented it to her for an opinion. She hastened to praise the story highly—perhaps too highly Hellman suspected—and singled out one particular phrase as having special merit. Hellman thought she was pulling her leg. Some months later, visiting Hellman’s farm in Pleasantville, New York, she inquired what had become of the story. It was pedestrian, Hellman replied. Dorothy quickly disagreed—it was original and sensitive, in her opinion. As she was saying this, she stumbled over the puppies they had brought along on their walk. Stooping to make sure the dogs were not hurt, she heard Hellman say that God must be dispensing justice by punishing puppies for the lies certain people told their friends. When Dorothy continued to insist that she really did like the story, Hellman walked on.

  In silence, they continued to a lake where Hellman intended to inspect some traps that had been set for snapping turtles. Hauling a trap out of the water, she placed it on the ground and they stared at the turtle. His penis, they could see, was erect with fear.

  Dorothy pinned on a catlike smile. She said prettily, “It must be pleasant to have sex appeal for turtles. Shall I leave you alone together?” Having paid her back, Dorothy was content to drop the matter.

  She enjoyed her invitations to Hellman’s house at the Vineyard, where the sight of the sea and the beaches transported her back to her earliest days in West End. Her apartment lacked air-conditioning and got miserably uncomfortable in summer. The only problem with staying at the Vineyard was Hammett’s dislike of her, an antipathy that had grown more pronounced over the years so that he refused to be around her. When her visits coincided with his absence, everything worked out fine. When they did not, Hammett stubbornly moved out of the house and made sure he did not return until after she had gone back to New York. In the summer of 1960, a few months before he died of lung cancer, leaving was impossible and Hellman told Dorothy that she would have to stay in a guest house down the road. She was not forthright about the reason for this odd arrangement, but it was not difficult to figure out the truth. In the evenings, after Hammett had fallen asleep, Dorothy was invited to join Hellman for dinner, Hellman’s second supper because she had already pretended to eat from a tray in Hammett’s room. That August, Dorothy never saw Hammett once. Out of tact, she asked no questions.

  What Hellman wanted, in payment for her kindness to Dorothy, was a seemingly easy favor—for anyone but Dorothy. Hellman wanted to be the sole exception to Dorothy’s habit of belittling people behind their backs. As the years went by and Hellman surrounded herself with apple-polishers, she eventually convinced herself that there were two people about whom Dorothy had never made an unkind remark: herself and Robert Benchley. This fantasy was reinforced by those who wished to get on her good side. The truth was, Dorothy’s nature caused her to abuse everyone except the Murphys. Although she said nothing derogatory about Benchley after his death, she had not spared him during the thirties and forties. She also poked fun at Hellman. She even did it to her face whenever she thought she could get away with it, but Hellman was determined to ignore this.

  Her feelings of closeness to people who had suffered for their political beliefs—friends like Hellman, the Mostels, the d’Usseaus—emerged at the expense of certain other old friendships. No longer did she see much of Harold and Alice Guinzburg, and she also began avoiding Sara and Gerald Murphy. “To be anti-Communist,” Gerald observed to Sara, “is to be anti-Dottie, apparently. Too bad.” If the Murphys were far from being militants, they did happen to be liberal Democrats who believed that actors and writers were “rather poor prey” for congressional investigators. During Lillian Hellman’s unsuccessful attempt to have Hammett released on bail after his arrest, Gerald emptied the Mark Cross safe of its receipts for that day and added a personal check to make a total of ten thousand dollars.

  Dorothy kept Sara and Gerald at a distance. Whenever she communicated with them, which was not often, she behaved as if nothing had changed. She liked to send amusing items clipped from newspapers. Once it was a “Dear Abby” column about a couple named Dorothy and John who were celebrating fifty years of marriage but fought like tigers at their golden anniversary party. Dorothy pasted the clipping on a sheet of Volney stationery, titled it “TOGETHERNESS!” and added a few tidbits of personal information: “I have been having lumbago. Oh, my God—I have a little poodle named Cliché. I love the Murphys (the last item is not new).” Even allowing for her aversion to letter writing, this piece of mail spoke volumes about the rift that had developed, and it saddened the Murphys. Somehow Dorothy contrived to ignore everyone’s feelings, including her own. To acknowledge that an estrangement had taken place would have been too painful.

  Living at the Volney had serious disadvantages when she wanted privacy. Simply to venture outside could be so tricky that Dorothy developed a self-protective maneuver. If she was walking down Madison Avenue and noticed someone she knew coming toward her, she stopped at a shop window and stared fixedly at some object until the person passed by. She cut many an old friend this way. Some people decided that her desire for privacy had to be respected, others concluded that she had become a hermit. Explained an acquaintance of thirty years, “I guess she didn’t want to stand on the street and pass a lot of polite gas with me.”

  Attacking either The New Yorker or the Round Table was now practically an avocation of hers. When given the opportunity, she happily announced that the cartoons were still wonderful but that the fiction had gone downhill abominably. The proof was that stories these days always seemed to be tedious accounts of the author’s childhood in Pakistan. At a party given by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams, she got to talking with James Geraghty, the magazine’s art editor. Under the circumstances it would have been politic to keep her mouth shut, but her tongue ran away and she proceeded to give Geraghty a complete airing of her views. He listened with equanimity. There was, she wound up tauntingly, no real wit in The New Yorker anymore.

  This last crack proved too much for Geraghty. “You mean like ‘Men never make passes at girls who wear glasses’?” he retorted.

  “You son of a bitch!” she hurled back, probably as much annoyed by his misquoting of her verse as his recollection of it.

  She rued the day she had written “News Item” and wished she had the power to destroy it. It was “a terrible thing to have made a serious attempt to write verse and then be remembered for two lines like those.” It also made her bilious the way the same old jokes were quoted whenever anyone wrote about her. She told Tallulah Bankhead that she must “even by accident, have said other things worth repeating, if the lazy sons-of-bitches bothered to find out.”

  Having once begun to embrace hardship, she elevated necessity to a principle and then martyred herself over it. She was hard up but not quite as broke as she pretended. Nevertheless, she continued to simplify her existence by paying strict attention to nickels and dimes and never going to Lord & Taylor or the Chemical Bank if she could help it. She conducted banking at her favorite liquor store, which was agreeable about cashing checks. Without neo-Puritanical Hellmans or d’Usseaus keeping her on a tight rein, she arranged her days to suit herself. She read books for Esquire, labored over her column, and occasionally accepted invitations to read from her writings at universities or at the Ninety-second Street YMHA, where they paid a tidy hundred and fifty dollars. Her stage fright had remained incurable. Once, before going on stage to speak before a woman’s group, she exclaimed, “Oh shit, what am I doing here!” She also made two long-play
ing records of her verse and fiction.

  During these years she seldom saw Alan, who was living in Hollywood, but she continued to receive news of him from friends. He had a small amount of royalty income from his investments in Mister Roberts and South Pacific, Joshua Logan’s Broadway hits. He managed a tour that the Welsh actor Emlyn Williams made of New Zealand, but beyond this he had no visible means of support. Often he had to live by his wits, aptly and sadly described by a friend as “living on the kindness of friends.” When he was short of money, he stayed at his mother’s house in Bucks County, usually when Horte was in Richmond, or he visited his friend Betty Moodie and her family in Erwinna. Sought after as a weekend guest, he became the unattached man that hostesses needed to round out the numbers at dinner parties. “He was a terribly witty, amusing man,” said Betty Moodie. “It was pathetic but when things got tough there was no doubt that he traded on those qualities just to get by. He would play bridge and be an entertaining companion. He was staying at my place once and I remember him saying that he had to go up to Tallulah’s for the weekend.” Weekend visits also were made to the home of Robert Sherwood’s widow, Madeline, who sometimes gave him discarded clothing—expensive outfits that he passed on to women friends. Often he was heard to remark that he wished Dorothy would stop drinking, or that he was trying to get her off the booze. “It was clear,” Moodie said, “that he wasn’t going to get any work without her.. She had resources if she could pull herself together but he had none.”

  If Alan was reduced to trading on his likeability in order to live, he displayed little of this charm around Dorothy when they met. He usually had a chip on his shoulder. She would make what she believed to be a perfectly ordinary remark and he would become antagonistic (or vice versa) and they wound up quarreling. The sight of Dorothy’s apartment displeased him. After a visit to the Volney, he told friends that she was living wretchedly, that he had found her wallowing in filth, and that the dog had littered the carpet.

  His quickness to take offense and to belittle her made Dorothy wary about seeing him. The strain of meeting also made him uneasy. Late one night, he stopped by unannounced and brought along a casual acquaintance, Wyatt Cooper. They had run into each other earlier at a party at the home of George Kaufman and his actress wife, Leueen MacGrath, who was a friend of Alan’s. Recently returned from London, Alan and Kaufman had coauthored a musical called The Lipstick War, a surprising collaboration because Kaufman had never particularly liked Alan—nor had he made a secret of his dislike. The Lipstick War was never produced, but that night Alan felt optimistic.

  It was late. Since she had been expecting no visitors, Dorothy looked disheveled, and the apartment was cluttered with dog toys on the sofa and soiled newspapers where Cliché had relieved herself. More embarrassing to Dorothy, she had finished every drop of liquor and had nothing to offer guests. After apologizing for her lack of hospitality and the condition of the apartment, she could think of nothing further to say and clammed up. Wyatt Cooper felt immensely uncomfortable and stood around with a frozen smile on his face. The scene, he later wrote, struck him as unreal. “Loneliness and guilt were almost like physical presences in the space between them, and they spoke in short, stilted, and polite sentences with terrible silences in between, and yet there was a tenderness in the exchange, a grief for old hurts, and a shared reluctance to turn loose.”

  When all conversation petered out, Alan and Cooper finally took their leave.

  Chapter 18

  HAM AND CHEESE, HOLD THE MAYO

  2941-1964

  In the spring of 1961, she agreed to join Alan in Hollywood. Unwilling to acknowledge any reconciliation, she characterized the trip as strictly business, because that was the level on which she wished to keep it. After two decades, they had been offered the chance to work together again. Their long-time friend Charles Brackett, now head of Twentieth Century-Fox, ignored Dorothy’s blacklisting and decided to hire them for an adaptation of a French stage play. More precisely, Alan had sought the job and was told he could have it but only on the condition that he send for Dorothy. The Good Soup was not much of a play, but Fox intended the property for its biggest star, Marilyn Monroe. No doubt, this tantalizing bait tempted Dorothy, for she greatly admired Monroe’s beauty and sensitivity. At the same time, she was understandably apprehensive about involving herself with Alan. Not only did it mean uprooting herself from a carefully constructed independence, but also it entailed leaving New York for a place she had always disliked and did not want to be, for a man from whom she had grown apart. Even on a temporary basis, the prospect had its disturbing aspects.

  A few years earlier, Alan had invested in property, an inexpensive bungalow in West Los Angeles he was planning to remodel and sell. When he assumed that Dorothy would live with him, she indignantly objected. It was hardly suitable for them to stay together after having been as good as divorced for ten years. She had grown accustomed to privacy. At the last minute, she relented—renting a hotel room would be foolish, she decided— but she continued to grumble lest he take her for granted. “I’m a hobo and mean to be forever.” To prove she felt strongly about her single life in New York, she kept her apartment and did not even notify the Volney that she planned to be out of town. She wrote that the two things she most hated were living in suburbia and “the tedium of marriage.” Moving in with Alan seemed to encompass both.

  Norma Place was a block-long street in West Hollywood, named years earlier for silent-screen star Norma Talmadge, whose dressing room and servants’ quarters were located there. The two-story frame building that she once had owned was now divided into handsome apartments occupied by Tuesday Weld, Estelle Winwood, and John Carlyle, among others. The rest of the street was lined with modest homes that originally had been constructed as low-income housing for streetcar workers. Alan had purchased one of these. His was a one-story, white stucco bungalow with combined living and dining room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms. It had a small front yard, a backyard, and a narrow cement walk leading up to an elaborately carved double door.

  Norma Place was a sociable street. Residents visited their neighbors’ homes for cocktails, ritually walked their dogs together, and cried on each other’s shoulders in times of sorrow. They also were dedicated news gatherers and gossips who seemed never to have heard of minding their own business. Dorothy christened the street Peyton Place West, but more commonly it was called Swish Alps and Boys Town, because the street as well as the entire neighborhood were heavily homosexual.

  Glamorous people abounded on Norma Place. Dorothy Dandridge and Carleton Carpenter owned homes. Nina Foch lived around the corner on Lloyd Place. Judy Garland frequently came to visit friends, and Oscar Levant and Hedy Lamarr attended parties. Still, Dorothy’s coming, a major event, immediately established her as the street’s foremost celebrity. As soon as her taxi stopped in front of Number 8983, it was obvious to her that Alan had misled his neighbors into interpreting her arrival as a romantic homecoming. As well-wishers came to the door, she found herself swept up in a sentimental greeting reminiscent of an Andy Hardy movie. After they departed, Dorothy felt fatigued and testy. Giving vent to her feeling that Alan had greatly overdone the occasion, she declared her loathing for the smell of flowers and pitched the welcoming bouquets of daisies and roses into the garbage can.

  On the third of April, they began twelve consecutive weeks of employment that was followed by sporadic work, which lasted until Thanksgiving. For Dorothy, these were cheerful months, a period marked by comparative sobriety and surprisingly good relations with Alan, both at home and on the job. They found congenial company in Wyatt Cooper, who was now working as a writer at Fox and who lived a few doors down the street in Carleton Carpenter’s converted garage apartment. Later, Alan splurged on a new car, a flashy dark-green Jaguar that he called his movie-star car, but at the time he and Dorothy hitched rides to work with Cooper. The young Mississippian, whom Dorothy nicknamed “the Sharecropper,” exhibited a determined eagerness
to please. His conduct was interpreted by other Norma Place residents as social climbing, but Dorothy considered him amusing and likeable. She also found his willingness to dance attendance on her and Alan useful, because his presence tended to create a buffer between them.

  At the studio, the three of them soon fell into the habit of meeting at noon and taking long lunch breaks in which they drove toward Santa Monica seeking interesting places to eat. They giggled about the secretary the studio had assigned to Dorothy and Alan, a woman far too solemn for their taste, and promised each other sleds for Christmas if they could make her laugh. Before long, the sourpuss secretary had been transformed into a running joke. Eavesdropping on her personal phone conversations, they could hardly wait to report them to Cooper when they met at lunchtime. Dorothy enjoyed loitering in the women’s room, where she picked up the latest studio dirt by listening to the secretaries gossip. All of this provided fresh fodder for a merriment that seems reminiscent of her happiness at Vanity Fair when she worked with Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood.

  On one of their lunch hours, they were browsing through a Santa Monica antique shop, a junky sort of place in Alan’s eyes, when Dorothy spotted a set of Napoleon and his marshals, thirteen painted porcelain figurines. For reasons mysterious even to her, she found Napoleon enthralling and had begun reading everything she could find about his life. She insisted on buying the set. At home she arranged it on top of a living room bookcase and asked Alan to install a special light overhead.

  All through the summer and fall of 1961 their mood continued to be gay. Having again taken over Dorothy’s correspondence, Alan cheerily wrote to Sara and Gerald Murphy that they were planning a trip to New York and would be thrilled to see them. “If by any chance you come out to Carmel, let us know and we will race up.” Alan wanted to believe he had rolled back the clock to 1936, when it had been possible to go larking from one amusing social engagement to another with himself as Dorothy’s manager. He was counting on the box-office success of The Good Soup—not an unreasonable expectation for a Marilyn Monroe picture—and other assignments surely following.