Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  The public lectures that she occasionally delivered on the subject of literature, for a fee of four or five hundred dollars, were also motivated by fear of poverty. Her briefest speech took place at the Monterey Public Library, where she was picketed by American Legionnaires who continued to regard her as a subversive. Some thirty of them stationed themselves conspicuously in the front rows and riveted their eyes upon her, even though they said nothing. After a few minutes, she stopped talking and stared back. Fred Shroyer, who had arranged the engagement, finally had to break the impasse by coming forward and himself speaking for another twenty minutes before declaring the evening at an end.

  A student from UCLA came by to interview Dorothy for the college newspaper. Alan, dapper in silk ascot and faultlessly creased trousers, made a production of serving tea and behaved like “a friendly butler who was keeping up the pretensions of a grander era.” Lois Battle thought them a strange couple, and she could not help wondering why the sophisticated Dorothy Parker had chosen such a husband “when she must have had many more opportunities.” Dorothy, only too eager to puncture Alan’s pretensions, took delight in describing herself as “a mongrel. My father was a Rothschild; my mother was a goy; and I went to a Catholic school around the corner.” Those who wished more information about her would just have to “wait ’till I’m dead.” To Battle’s questions about politics, Dorothy reeled out provocative replies, advocating violence of thought and declaring that people who could accept injustice might as well kill themselves.

  In the presence of visitors, Dorothy and Alan donned company manners: she was gracious and animated, he came across as deferential to a preposterous degree. Remarks to each other were pointedly prefaced by “dear.” Alone, they lapsed into old patterns of bickering, although the bantering tended to be gentle because they were having good times together. Dorothy likened Alan to “Betty Boop going down for the last time.”

  “You are Betty Boop,” he shot back, “and as far as I’m concerned you have gone down for the last time.” Then he added playfully, “Well, it’s the end of the rainbow for both of us, I fear.”

  Sometimes Alan was not amusing. One evening when they had invited Cathleen Nesbitt and Wyatt Cooper for dinner, he got unpleasantly drunk and ruined the meal. Dorothy treated him with patience and quietly offered congratulations on the delicious meal.

  Her behavior could be equally embarrassing. She often spoke of wanting to meet Igor Stravinsky. Since Miranda and Ralph Levy were friends of the composer, they volunteered to arrange a special dinner party. Dorothy, recalled Miranda Levy, “had had a few nippies beforehand,” arrived at the party drunk, and doggedly refused to address more than a few mumbled words to Stravinsky the entire evening.

  It was not unusual for her to become intoxicated at social gatherings, but she did not appreciate Alan doing likewise. She was uncomfortable and complained that he behaved like an old grump. He used to be fun when he drank, she said.

  Her time was occupied by classes, the book with Shroyer, and her Esquire column, but Alan had nothing to do. He talked about a number of projects, including a screenplay collaboration with his friend Bill Temple-ton, and he also promised to reserve one day a week for work on the house. He wanted to convert the garage into a rental apartment. Little progress seemed to take place with any of these tasks. Much of the time he appeared to be at leisure, strolling about the neighborhood with the dogs or carting groceries home from Shermart, always wearing his pink sailor hat. Some afternoons he agreed to drive Dorothy to Fred Shroyer’s house in Monterey Park. While they discussed selections for the anthology, Alan and Shroyer’s wife Patricia passed the time playing cards. It was always Dorothy who abruptly gave the signal for their departure. “The doggies will be needing their din-din,” she said.

  Usually their social life depended on Alan. If he wanted to accept an invitation, they would go out; if he felt like cooking, they would have company. Otherwise they spent quiet evenings at home with Dorothy lounging on the sofa reading, chain-smoking, and sipping Scotch. She ignored ashtrays and allowed the cigarette to burn down to her fingers before knocking off the ash. Both she and Alan had so little interest in television that they did not buy a set. They owned a stereo but seldom turned it on. Questioned by a reporter about what she did for fun, she answered, “Everything that isn’t writing is fun.”

  She continued to write for Esquire, but she was finding the work grueling after four years. It was not surprising that she began to miss more deadlines than ever. Meanwhile, review copies arrived almost daily and were stacked on tables and chairs until there was no place to sit. When Alan felt energetic, he opened the packages and sorted through the books, selecting those he thought she might like and sometimes even skimming them for her.

  If Arnold Gingrich once had imagined the high-forceps system to be foolproof, he now realized his mistake. It was necessary to hold forms until the very last minute. Often he obtained the column only after frantic telephoning to ask when he might expect it. “I sent it days ago,” Dorothy told him when she had not written a word. Sometimes, by skillful begging, he persuaded her to dictate a few paragraphs over the phone. Gingrich figured out that whenever she missed a month, she was apt to miss the next as well, but then the third month she might come through if he kept his fingers crossed. When he did get a column, it was good enough to excuse the absent ones. Eventually he was reduced to addressing playful letters to “Dear Dorothy Dix”:I was fifty-nine on my last birthday. I publish a magazine. In it are what is called departments. These are about a number of things. One of them is about books when it is ...

  What am I to do? The lady who writes about books must not enjoy it. Maybe that just shows she is a lady.

  Please advise me, dear Dorothy Dix.

  Gingrich signed himself “Perplext,” but “Dorothy Dix” was not disposed to advise him and did not reply. Therefore he was jolted to discover her teaching at Cal State, doing the kind of job he “could have sworn she wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole,” and he marveled that “the only thing you can expect from her is the unexpected.”

  Dorothy could not summon up the confidence to quit the magazine and insisted she needed the money. By now Esquire had been added to the list of topics that she and Alan regularly squabbled over. With relish, he nagged her about missed deadlines. She pretended that his noisy hammering and sawing prevented her from writing and sent him to Wyatt Cooper’s place for the afternoon. When he returned, she announced that she had written the column and deposited it in the mailbox, when Alan knew this was certainly a lie. On leaving the house once, he carefully stretched a hair across the keyboard of her typewriter to trap her.

  Innocent of the dramas taking place in West Hollywood, Gingrich continued to pay her in the hope of obtaining further columns. Her last reviews for the magazine, as it turned out, were published in December 1962.

  She had imagined Cal State as “an academic paradise under the elms.” Instead, she was surprised to discover “18,000 students and 150 parking spaces.” The seventy-two students who registered for her classes failed to fit her picture of college kids. Most of them were over twenty-five, some were veterans with families to support, and a few appeared to be middle-aged. Fred Shroyer promised that it would be a privilege and an inspiration for them to hear her reminiscence about the writers she had known personally, about Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Shroyer was wrong. Dorothy’s students were there to obtain three credits, not from any interest in literature. Many of them failed to get much pleasure from reading. To most of them, her name meant absolutely nothing. If at the outset that made her feel like their “grandmother’s grandmother,” she soon realized they were unfamiliar with practically all writers. If they had never heard of James Joyce or read Faulkner, she reminded herself, “Why would they have heard of me?” She found their political conservatism and their general narrowness of mind to be disgraceful. When she assigned The Grapes of Wrath, some of them called it obscene, and one said that her mother did
n’t want the book in the house. While studying Sister Carrie, Dorothy found herself in the ridiculous position of having to defend not only Dreiser but also adultery in literature. It only stood to reason that their writing skills would disappoint her. She discovered only three of them were able to put together a sensible English sentence.

  In preparation for the job, Dorothy bought new clothes. She took particular care with her hair and makeup, and she arrived at her classroom composed, patient, and sober. Sometimes, after only ten or fifteen minutes, she ran out of things to say. She confided to Sally Foster that she found the job humiliating. Teaching at a city college was fine for a younger person, she said, but she was nearly seventy, just a little too old for this sort of pressure. In an effort to maintain a benign attitude toward her students, she went to extremes. “I never give a bad mark,” she told Foster, “and I never fail anyone.” As Parker Ladd came to realize, “She was not a successful teacher. She had absolutely no connection with those students and couldn’t figure out how to communicate with them. About a third of the time she didn’t show up for class.”

  Ladd and Shroyer had counted on Alan’s participation, because he had expressed so much initial enthusiasm for the job. They expected him to read and grade papers, or at the very least to chauffeur Dorothy back and forth to the campus, nearly an hour’s commute each direction. But Alan, suddenly quite peevish, surprised them by refusing to perform these services.

  By the beginning of 1963, it was not unusual for him to drink all day, starting with Bloody Marys for breakfast and continuing until bedtime, when he would finish off the day with a Scotch nightcap. To some of his neighbors, he appeared “stoned,” which was an accurate impression because he was addicted to barbiturates. Dorothy had grown accustomed to his sedatives. He had used them ever since she had known him, and by now they were so much a part of his routine that questioning the habit never occurred to her. Alan even had to take a sleeping pill for an afternoon nap because, she once joked to Lillian Hellman, “he hates to toss and turn from four to six.”

  What concerned her now was his heavy drinking, which made him aggressive, sloppy, and sullen. She mentioned to Noel Pugh that she feared him when he was drunk. Her requests to be taken out for a ride in the Jaguar often occurred when Alan had been drinking and she needed to escape from the house for a while. Pugh noticed thatthey were fighting like hell. There were some pretty nasty fights about Alan’s mother, and sometimes he cried. He was drunk most of the time, and she was drunk half the time.

  Dorothy was not above needling him, aiming straight for the jugular with snipes about his being “worthless.” She would tell him, “You’ve never been able to earn your own living.” It angered her that after thirty years he still depended on her labors, her name.

  Alan devised a novel means of escape. In a library somewhere he had once seen a bookcase that cleverly concealed a secret door, just the sort of gadget that he adored. Removing the door from his bedroom, he replaced it with one of the trick bookcases and filled the shelves with books. The door could be opened from either side by a hidden release if one knew where the catch was located. After a screaming quarrel with Dorothy, or when he wished to be alone, he stormed behind the bookcase door and placed himself beyond her reach.

  With Alan barricaded in his room, she consoled herself with Cliché’s litter of three puppies. Since they had no noticeable personalities, she began referring to them as Premiere, Deuxième, and Troisième, the order of their births. There were five animals in the small house, but she insisted that you could never have too many dogs. The finish on the hardwood floors was soon past redemption, and there always seemed to be a mess somewhere.

  Throughout the spring, the friction in the house continued to mount. At times she humored Alan. In recent months he had championed a friend of his who wanted to make an independent film of The Ladies of the Corridor and asked for a ninety-day option without payment. Dorothy and Arnaud d‘Usseau were agreeable, and Leah Salisbury could see no harm in giving Eugene Solow the free option, although for sixty days instead of the ninety he had requested. The option period passed before Solow could arrange financial backing. When he asked for an extension, Salisbury turned him down. Alan, upset, was unwilling to let the project drop. He and Dorothy should write a screenplay and then form a corporation to purchase the rights for five thousand dollars, he suggested. This time both Salisbury and d’Usseau reacted coolly to the plan.

  To Dorothy’s immense relief, the job at Cal State was nearing its end. Shortly before the close of the semester, she spouted off to the Los Angeles Times that her students were the stupidest people on the face of the earth. She described them as humorless, hopelessly crass, illiterate prigs who only wanted a college education so they could make lots of money. At the last minute she made a half-hearted effort to soften her indictment by saying the fault was probably hers—she was a poor teacher.

  The next day she arrived at the classroom to discover that some of her students read newspapers and did not appreciate her remarks. Furthermore, they were not shy about expressing their resentment. On the blackboard they had listed every allegation they could dig up regarding her allegiance to the Communist Party. Their actions only confirmed what she had felt all along, that they hated her as much as she hated them.

  The fourteenth of June began with Alan gulping a round of Bloody Marys. When Clara Lester arrived later that morning to clean, she found him “drunk as a skunk. It was pathetic how he was staggering all over the place.” He insisted on going out to pick up his dry cleaning. When he got back to the house, he admitted stopping once or twice to pull himself together.

  Dorothy was dressing to go out. The previous week Sally Foster had led her to a sale on good dresses and a new hairdresser. She received so many compliments that she had made another appointment with the same stylist. When she saw Alan, he was carrying his bag of dry cleaning. Saying that he planned to lie down for a while, he disappeared behind the bookcase.

  She returned home in the late afternoon. When she called to Alan through the bookshelves, there was no answer. She continued to call out more urgently. Finally, with a great deal of difficulty, she managed to locate the spring release and step into the room. He was curled up on the bed with the stub of a cigarette clenched between his fingers and the plastic cleaning bag draped around his neck and shoulders. Limey jumped onto the bed and began barking and tugging at the plastic. As Dorothy bent down to shake Alan, she noticed that the floor next to his bed was sprinkled with Seconal capsules. He felt strange to her touch and only then did she realize that “rigor mortis had already set in.”

  The coroner’s report showed that Alan had died of “acute barbiturate poisoning due to an ingestion of overdose” and listed him as a probable suicide. None of his friends believed he had intentionally killed himself. A few days earlier, he had strolled into Nina Foch’s courtyard with the dogs and struck her as looking unusually sad. “I don’t think he meant to kill himself, but I also felt that he’d not unaccidentally done this thing,” Foch said. Dorothy told the papers that Alan had exerted himself while remodeling the house. She added that he had a history of heart trouble. To friends, she continued to maintain that the death was a mishap.

  In the first hours after Alan’s death, the little house was crowded with friends and neighbors. Dorothy greeted new arrivals at the door with invitations to fix themselves a drink, then repeated the details of how she had found Alan cold behind the bookshelves. Eventually, someone remembered Alan’s family. A call was placed to Richmond, and Dorothy came to the phone to speak with Roy Eichel. “She asked me what should be done with the body. I told her that Horte would want Alan to come home and be buried in the family plot, next to where her grave would be.” He was a little surprised when she readily agreed.

  The finality and abruptness of Alan’s departure at the age of fifty-nine stunned her. Torn between anguish and anger, she had a hard time responding civilly to expressions of sympathy. A woman who had been fond of
Alan and who had always pretended to like her, although Dorothy doubted it, came over to offer condolences and assistance, as had many people that evening. How could she help? she asked.

  “Get me a new husband,” Dorothy replied without a flicker of expression.

  The shocked woman said that the remark was the most vulgar and tasteless she had ever heard.

  “I’m sorry,” Dorothy told her. “Then run down to the corner and get me a ham and cheese on rye. And tell them to hold the mayo.”

  Three days later, she shipped Alan’s body to his mother in a bronze casket, the most expensive one she could buy. He was buried in the Hebrew Cemetery next to his Uncle Mann and, three years later, Horte was placed on his other side. Alan’s childhood friend Joseph Bryan and other friends and classmates from Virginia Military Institute served as pallbearers.

  Dorothy did not attend the funeral, nor did she arrange a memorial service in Los Angeles. The whole ritual of dying, the blubbery condolences, the eulogizing of the deceased, struck her as ridiculous. It was just as well that she remained ignorant of the furor taking place in Richmond. When the coffin arrived, Roy Eichel was so shocked by Alan’s appearance that he suspected the wrong person had been shipped. The corpse did not even look like his nephew. Concerned about Horte’s reaction, he rushed home to find a photograph so that the embalmer might make up the face to resemble Alan as a younger man.

  It was a hot, smoggy summer in Los Angeles, made all the more stifling because the living room windows, which extended down to the floor, could not be opened without the dogs’ running out. That autumn she received a visit from the Associated Press because she had turned seventy in August. She certainly didn’t feel seventy, she said—she felt ninety. If she had any “decency,” she would be dead, she added, because “most of my friends are.” During the interview, she sipped straight Scotch. Soon she would be leaving for New York where she planned to resume her Esquire column and publish another collection of short stories, the last an extraordinary statement because she had not written a story in five years. She wanted to be “taken seriously” as a short-story writer and “by God, I hope I make it.” It was hard to make herself heard over the barking of the dogs. “Oh, children,” she scolded, “please!”