Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  During the fall, Dorothy was forced to decide whether or not she would stay in California. At first, she had been careful to mail her rent to the Volney each month. By August, feeling increasingly ambivalent, she was neglecting the rent. This lapse brought a polite note from the manager along with a reminder that her lease was due to expire at the end of September and that a renewal on 9E would mean a rent increase to $450 a month. Dorothy procrastinated. The Volney sent a telegram to notify her that if she failed to renew the hotel would be forced to charge her a monthly rate of $600. Hearing this, but still wondering about the wisdom of burning her bridges, she gave up the apartment. Life was proving sweet lately.

  Wyatt Cooper noticed the immense pleasure she and Alan found in each other’s company and sensed that this was how it must have been in earlier years. He was delighted to discover that this Dorothy, in marked contrast to the Dorothy he had first met at the Volney with Alan, had a mind as quick and young as a girl’s. Seldom was he aware of the difference between their ages.

  When Cooper’s assignment at Fox ended, he applied for unemployment compensation. This was a natural step for a writer who found himself out of work, but it was not one that occurred naturally to Dorothy and Alan, who resisted his suggestions that they should apply too. No doubt they considered it demeaning, but they also expected more film work to be forthcoming at any moment. Neither was convinced that they were entitled to such payments, particularly in Dorothy’s case, because she received a regular income from Esquire as well as royalties from Viking. In the end, Cooper broke down their reluctance. By his calculations, it would mean seventy-five tax-free dollars a week for each of them, which added up to the considerable sum of about six hundred dollars a month.

  Their applications were approved, and soon they appeared every week to sign cards claiming their availability for work. Seeing the parking lot full of Rolls-Royces and sporty Cadillacs, Dorothy decided that just as many celebrities could be found at the unemployment office as at Romanoff’s and, she said, “it’s a much nicer set.” Some months later, when signing for the checks had become a part of their regular weekly routine, they realized that The Good Soup did not represent a comeback, in spite of their high hopes. Afterward, Dorothy said in disgust that they had written “a nice, little, innocent bawdy French farce” for Marilyn Monroe, but that Hollywood remained as always, a place where “everybody’s a writer and has ideas.” Fox, she said, no doubt with exaggeration, “took our script and hoked it up with dope pushers, two murders and, straight out of Fanny Hurst, the harlot with the heart of goo.”

  The troubles encountered by The Good Soup had more to do with circumstance than with the quality of their script. At that time, Monroe’s contract with Fox called for two more pictures. When the studio gave her a script called Something’s Got to Give, a remake of a 1940 Irene Dunne comedy, she indifferently agreed to do it and a starting date was set for the spring of 1962. Owing to her emotional disintegration, she proved incapable of sustained work and frequently absented herself from the set. Finally, in June, Fox fired her and suspended production on the film. Very shortly the question of whether or not Monroe would be reinstated or eventually go on to make another film became irrelevant because her life ended that August. The Good Soup was never produced.

  Long before Monroe’s death, Dorothy and Alan had to face the fact that getting another film job would not be easy. Whenever The Good Soup was mentioned, Alan hurried to change the subject because, a friend recalled, “he knew that he and Dottie were dead at Twentieth.”

  Instead of sharing Alan’s double bed, Dorothy preferred the front bedroom with its twin bed and a table where she had set up her typewriter. Even though it allowed some privacy, the house with its tiny rooms felt claustrophobic. During their months at the studio, progress on Alan’s home-improvement projects slowed down considerably. The unfinished kitchen where he had stripped tiles off the counter and torn out cabinets had fallen into a state of permanent rubble. Clara Lester, who had worked for the Eichel family in Richmond during Alan’s childhood, now lived in Hollywood and came in several times a week to clean and cook. She and Alan engaged in a running battle about the condition of the kitchen, since it was practically impossible to cook in there. “He was hard to work for,” Lester recalled, “because he was so fussy about every little thing. But Dorothy was different, so sweet and kind and she didn’t bother a soul.”

  Dorothy regarded herself as a guest in the house. If the kitchen was cluttered, it made no difference to her. What she did mind was noise. On those days Alan worked on the repairs, she had to live with hammering. The racket in the house intensified when he decided to buy a dog, a bad-tempered male Sealyham terrier puppy whom he named Limey. It almost seemed as if he felt outnumbered by Dorothy and Cliché and sought an ally. Cliche objected strenuously to Limey. From the minute he entered the house, they were constantly at odds.

  Dorothy did not feel entirely comfortable living in Norma Place. The house was Alan’s house, their friends his friends, the way of life one that suited his taste. Even neighborhood parties proved tricky. At one gathering, a young man fell on his knees before her in a reverent pose and placed a notebook of his writings in her lap. Dorothy failed to find his homage touching.

  At a cocktail party given by Dana Woodbury, she entered the living room to be confronted by a life-sized nude portrait of her host, which had been painted by Christopher Isherwood’s talented protege, Don Bachardy. Woodbury handed her a cocktail, then asked what she thought of the painting. She gazed at it thoughtfully. She didn’t wish to offend Dana, who had once been a Buddhist monk. In the painting he was seated, facing front, and his genitals had been executed with remarkable attention to detail.

  She finally cooed, “Oh, my dear, it’s so real, you almost feel it could speak to you.”

  At another party, when some of the guests began gushing over “Big Blonde,” she fumed silently. A man standing nearby apologized for his ignorance of the story. “Miss Parker,” he confessed, “I’ve never read a word you’ve written.”

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Rothwell.”

  “Well, Rothwell,” replied Dorothy, “keep it that way and we’ll be friends.”

  The nonliterary Robert Rothwell, an acting student, appealed to her because he made no pretense to being an intellectual, did not live in Norma Place, and dated beautiful fashion models. Listening to him talk about his boyhood in Santa Barbara, where he had played basketball, was refreshing to her. Other people for whom she had warm feelings included Nina Foch; an old friend from the thirties, Sally Blane Foster; and actor Clement Brace, who had appeared in The Ladies of the Corridor. Brace lived across the street with his friend John Dall. She also exhibited maternal feelings toward a college boy named Noel Pugh, with whom she liked to whip around town in Alan’s Jaguar. To prepare for these outings, she wrapped a large scarf around her head because, she joked, she feared catching cold and dying. They drove by the Hollywood Ranch Market, where she claimed to be fascinated by a piece of California gadgetry, an immense clock whose hands never stopped revolving to indicate that the market never closed. It had been erected, she swore, as part of a cosmic plot to drive her insane. Whenever Saboteur happened to be playing in the area, she insisted Pugh take her to see it. It was not the film that drew her, but eagerness to watch herself on the screen in her cameo bit with Alfred Hitchcock. Saboteur, like all her pictures, heartily bored her. Once her scene was over she promptly nudged Pugh and announced that she was ready to leave.

  A great many gay men lived in the neighborhood. Some of them went out of their ways to do her kindnesses, but she did not feel totally comfortable in homosexual society. Nevertheless, she tried to maintain good relations with her new gay friends and to retain her composure under all circumstances. Behind their backs, she made nasty digs and laughed that one of her more precious neighbors resembled Shirley Temple tossing her curls. Others she dismissed as “kiss-ass bores.”

  The fa
ct that Alan elected to make his home in Norma Place and that many of his friends were now homosexual seems to lend credibility to Dorothy’s old suspicions about him. Those who knew Alan at this time believed he was gay, although not sexually active. At parties, recalled Clement Brace, “He would always get drunk and make passes at all the boys,” but that was the extent of his activity. Said Dana Woodbury, “Never in the whole time I knew him did I see him do anything that was bisexual or homosexual. I don’t think he ever did.” Another friend thought that even if he did not sleep with men, he was attracted to them. “He was not a queen, in fact was very manly, but there was no doubt he was homosexual. Having that sort of mate suited Dorothy exactly. I don’t think she was ever very amorous. It was surprising how many gay people hung around their house, but it didn’t have to be that way. If she had wished, there could have been an entirely different crowd.”

  Around the neighborhood women, Dorothy did her best to maintain a regal distance. To avoid Estelle Winwood, with whom Alan had lived before he met her, she walked Cliche on the opposite side of the street. When Winwood saw her with the dog one day and called out an invitation to tea, Dorothy declined with ill-feigned sweetness. She was afraid to cross the freeway, she yelled back. Her aversion to screenwriter Hagar Wilde (I Was a Male War Bride) was clearly revealed when she permitted Cliché to do her business on Wilde’s lawn. Wilde turned it into a shoot-out by demanding she clean it up, which Dorothy refused to do. A tiny blonde in her fifties who owned a flock of large, aggressive cats, Wilde angrily threatened to call the police and have Dorothy arrested.

  “Just who the hell do you think you are?” fumed Wilde. “The queen of Rumania? If that animal shits on my property one more time—”

  “There’s no need to be tasteless, my dear,” Dorothy replied and ambled off.

  After The Good Soup, Dorothy and Alan began to talk about writing for the stage, and she instructed Leah Salisbury to “find us a play to adapt—from the French or the Ukrianian or something. We’d love to do it.” Salisbury took her at her word. Before a week passed, she came up with an assignment to adapt the book for a musical. Just as swiftly Dorothy rejected the job: DEAR LEAH SO SORRY BUT AFTER TWO DAYS MULLING ALAN AND I DO NOT FEEL MUSIC AT MIDNIGHT IS FOR US. PLEASE HOWEVER BEAR US IN MIND FOR SOMETHING ELSE. Salisbury continued to present writing projects, but Dorothy found none of them suitable. Nina Foch recalled that “somebody at CBS was always offering her work, but she refused. She would get very grand and turn down things she could have done.” Dorothy insisted that television producers did nothing but talk because there was no contract in the end, not even “a warmly clasped hand.”

  Pride prevented both her and Alan from accepting work. He too felt that he had an image to maintain. Prior to Dorothy’s arrival, he was offered an acting job by the producer of the Jack Benny television show. It had been necessary for Ralph Levy, a friend, to wheedle and cajole. Finally, Alan consented only because he thought it might be fun. On the Benny program, he had a special spot in which he sat in the audience and interrupted the show by pretending to represent the sponsor’s advertising agency. He was, according to Levy, “very, very funny. Afterward, I know, he was offered other acting jobs,” but he accepted none of them. Since his early days as a juvenile on Broadway, he associated acting with second-class citizenship.

  That winter, Dorothy collected unemployment insurance and wrote for Esquire. If anyone brought up the subject of creative writing, she claimed to have run out of ideas. “Not too long ago I tried to write a story. I got my name and address on the sheet; a title, which stank; and the first sentence: ‘The stranger appeared in the doorway.’ Then I had to lie down with a wet cloth on my face.” Serious problems had developed with her teeth, which entailed a series of long, painful visits to the dentist and “as a result, I have been pretty languid the rest of the time.” Reverting to old habits, she again allowed Alan to manage their daily lives and make decisions about when to pay the bills.

  In the spring, three of her short stories were performed on New York television by Margaret Leighton and Patrick O’Neal. Dramatization of “The Lovely Leave,” “A Telephone Call,” and “Dusk Before Fireworks” had been arranged by Leah Salisbury and The Viking Press. For some reason, Dorothy treated the sale with complete lack of appreciation. She told The New York Times that she knew nothing about the forthcoming production except what she read in the papers, although she supposed it had been approved by her agent, “who reads fine type in a contract the way you would a sonnet.” She went on to say that she had been troubled by financial headaches lately and resented having received no compensation for the rights to her stories.

  There was not a particle of truth in this, because Talent Associates paid thirty-two hundred dollars for the rights. What made her cranky was that the money would be paid to The Viking Press and then remitted to Dorothy in her regular semiannual royalty checks, which meant that she would not see the payment for another six months. Alan, who spent a great deal of time ranting about how little income Dorothy’s writings brought in, behaved as if the customary system for distribution of authors’ royalties had been newly invented by Viking in order to persecute them. It was “awful,” he wrote to Salisbury and wondered why the Author’s League tolerated publishers who collected interest on authors’ royalties. Dorothy let him bluster and compose protesting letters to Leah Salisbury. It gave him something to do.

  During this period, a number of producers expressed interest in adapting Dorothy’s writings for the stage. Most notable was Haila Stoddard, who had enjoyed considerable success with A Thurber Carnival, a Broadway revue based on James Thurber’s pieces and drawings, and hoped to repeat her formula with Dorothy’s material. In collaboration with director John Lehne, Stoddard arranged a half-dozen stories and a sampling of verses into a revue that she titled There Was Never More Fun Than a Man. To embellish the writing, she suggested including two dozen unpublished songs of Vincent Youmans. Stoddard, bubbling with enthusiasm, planned a Broadway show album and passed on to Salisbury Geraldine Page’s remark that even Dorothy Parker’s hiccups were actable. The project was beginning to sound like a winner.

  When Dorothy received the completed script, however, she rejected it after a single reading. She felt so upset that she could not write to Leah Salisbury and instead dictated her reaction to Alan, who accordingly typed out a letter to the agent. Dorothy “hated” Stoddard and Lehne’s revision of “Here We Are,” its setting changed from a train to a bedroom where the newlyweds are undressing. She “hated” the additional material they had written. The closing scene in which “Dorothy” plays with a razor, nicks herself by mistake, then recites “you might as well live,” did not appeal to her either. The only part to win her approval was the idea of using Youmans’s tunes. In her opinion, it took a first-rate mind to do a skillful adaptation “and certainly neither Haila nor her collaborator has one.” She was, in truth, deeply disappointed because of all the proposals, Stoddard’s had sounded the most promising. All along she had insisted that her stories did not lend themselves to adaptation because “nothing much really happens in them.” Nevertheless, her hopes were aroused.

  During the summer, she and Alan took turns wringing their hands about money and seeking scapegoats—the Jaguar, the house, the renovations. Alan loaded the Jaguar with cartons of review books, some unopened, and barreled around to the Pickwick or various other bookshops to sell them. At Shermart, he purchased the cheapest brand of Scotch and poured it into Black Label bottles. Among those growing concerned about them was Parker Ladd, West Coast editor for Charles Scribner’s. He noticed that Dorothy never seemed to spend any money. With the help of Frederick Shroyer, an English professor at California State College in Los Angeles, Ladd conceived the idea of Dorothy joining the English faculty there, perhaps succeeding to the chair recently vacated by Christopher Isherwood. At first, he said nothing to her but instead tested the idea on Alan, who reacted positively and allowed himself to be enlisted as an accom
plice in the scheming that continued for some months. By the time they presented the plan to Dorothy, it was inflated into an honor so significant that to refuse would have been practically equivalent to rejecting the Nobel Prize. During the summer, final arrangements were made with the university for her to become Distinguished Visiting Professor of English. For teaching two courses in twentieth-century American and British literature, she was to receive a handsome salary of twenty thousand dollars. It seemed perfect.

  In photographs taken that summer, she was radiant and laughing, her face unusually animated and her eyes girlishly flirtatious under the bangs. Seated behind a coffee table stacked with books, Cliché’s head resting in her lap, she looked lovely.

  With the Cal State salary to support them, she and Alan relinquished their unemployment benefits, and now other funds began to trickle in as well. Parker Ladd arranged for her to collaborate with Fred Shroyer on an anthology of short stories for Scribner’s, a project that brought several thousand extra dollars into the Parker-Campbell bank account. Once again the Black Label bottles held genuine Black Label. Unwanted review copies were distributed to friends. Dorothy squeezed two crumpled hundred-dollar bills into the hand of a surprised Robert Rothwell and urged him to take a vacation. Despite the newfound income, she still felt poor. Ladd remembered that she continued to “bitch and complain. Clearly she loved living hand-to-mouth.”