Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  About this time, she renewed her friendship with Wyatt Cooper, who was married to Gloria Vanderbilt and living in New York. One evening she accompanied them to the United Nations to hear a recital by Libby Holman. After the concert, at a party at the singer’s brownstone, Dorothy posed for photographs with Holman, Mainbocher, and Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper. In contrast to Mrs. Cooper, whose smile stretched forever, Dorothy was wearing a sour, quizzical expression, possibly reflecting her displeasure with the Coopers, who had lured her to the concert with the promise that Jacqueline Kennedy would be joining their party. The former first lady failed to show up. It turned out to be a festive evening during which many people fussed excessively over Dorothy, but her pleasure was ruined. She vented her disappointment by dressing down the Coopers for inviting her “under false pretenses.”

  Equally annoying was Truman Capote’s oversight when he neglected to invite her to a ball he was planning at the Plaza Hotel, an event that the papers were billing as the party of the century. She lost no time telephoning Tallulah Bankhead to express her indignation, which Bankhead passed along to Capote. He admitted that he had forgotten to put Dorothy’s name on the guest list. Bankhead told him that was exactly Dottie’s point; she wanted to attend so that people would know she was still alive. Capote maintained that it was too late and that it would be rude to invite her at the last minute.

  When a young man from radio station WBAI came to tape an interview with her, she felt extremely frisky. Richard Lamparski was just beginning a career that nostalgically chronicled the lives of celebrities past their primes. Especially adept at handling women, he captured Dorothy at her most fey by flattering her outrageously. Given an opportunity to run through her entire act, she described herself as a relic from the “long, long days ago” when she had been known as “the toast of two continents—Australia and Greenland” and professed amazement that anybody still remembered her name.

  She took a liking to Lamparski, who invited her to movies at the Museum of Modern Art and entertained her with stories about the stars he met in the course of his work. When she heard that he was scheduled to visit Christine Jorgenson in the Long Island suburb of Massapequa, she expressed surprise. What on earth was Jorgenson doing in a place like Massapequa? Lamparski guessed it was because she took care of her mother, who happened to live there. Dorothy avidly pressed for more details. “Have you met her mother?”

  “Not yet,” said Lamparski. “Why?”

  “Because I’d be very interested in knowing what sex she is,” said Dorothy.

  Having nothing better to do, she indulged her love of gossip. Apart from a desire to know what Jackie Kennedy ate for breakfast and the sex of Christine Jorgenson’s mother, she followed the doings of the rich, the famous, and the social. As a joke, someone gave her a subscription to Women’s Wear Daily, a fashion paper known for its coverage of such personages, but it was no joke to Dorothy, who devoured each issue with glee, mocking socialites such as Mrs. William Paley and Mrs. Winston Guest and calling model Jean Shrimpton “preposterous.” She found them as diverting as fictional characters and refused to listen when anybody suggested that the “Beautiful People” were not as bad as she assumed. They were as bad, she insisted; they were “idiots” who made her feel “sick” but, she said, “I love to read about them.”

  Her other pastime was watching her television set, a piece of equipment she had acquired in the hopes of drowning out the nurse’s chatter—“but she talked right along with it.” Now the nurse was gone but the television remained. Even though she felt obliged to apologize for its presence, she did not in truth dislike the programs as much as she pretended. The set was going from morning to night.

  The program that she claimed as her favorite was a comedy show, That Was the Week That Was. Her real favorites, however, were soap operas. Afternoon visitors were obliged to watch them with her or to hear about the latest episode of As the World Turns. Or, if she was not reporting on the soaps, it was the latest gossip about women like Barbara Paley, the “silly” jet-setters whose activities she followed.

  Shallow conversation was hardly what people expected from Dorothy. Some of her friends found it extremely disconcerting. They had difficulty understanding that the hours crawled by, and soap operas helped pass the afternoons, until it was twilight and a waiter knocked on her door with the daily menu. An hour later, he reappeared bearing a tray. Even if she sent it back more or less untouched, it filled the void until she could settle down to Scotch and plotting the evening TV lineup. As she had written, if you can get through the twilight in New York, you’ll survive the night.

  On the evening of her seventy-second birthday, she was invited to Sid and Laura Perelman’s Village apartment. While she enjoyed the celebration, her style was cramped because her doctor had grown increasingly tiresome about liquor, and she had meekly pledged not to touch a drop. Holding a glass of soda made her feel foolish.

  “Do you know what this is?” she said to Heywood Hale Broun as she held up the glass with undisguised disgust. “Ginger ale. Isn’t that awful?”

  She understood that drinking had become dangerous because it increased the risk of falls. She could afford no more of them. Her periodic resolutions to go on the wagon were always short-lived. On more than one occasion, expected at a friend’s house for dinner, she nipped into the Carlyle bar to fortify herself and forgot to come out. Several times she went too far with Scotch and found herself in Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital. Whenever visitors appeared, she politely offered them a drink, then guessed she would pour one for herself.

  But one led to many. Parker Ladd believed that if he helped her empty a bottle, that would be the end of it, and she would be forced to stop for the day. One night shortly before Christmas 1965, he prepared highball after highball for them, swallowing a little of his own and dumping the rest down the sink. Finally he heaved a sigh of relief to find the bottle empty. To his amazement, Dorothy hauled herself up and began rummaging around on the closet floor among some old shoes. In triumph, she produced another bottle of Scotch. That year she spent the holiday in the hospital.

  Increasingly, Dorothy’s drinking upset her friends. Ruth Goetz discovered that even an hour’s visit was “heavy going” and found herself feeling relieved when it was time to leave. Lillian Hellman only appeared when she was summoned in times of crisis, and she fled once the emergency was over. Dorothy’s alcoholism made her “dull and repetitive,” she wrote, and in any case she was unable to assume “the burdens that Dottie, maybe by never asking for anything, always put on her friends.” Dorothy pretended not to notice Hellman’s neglect. On those rare occasions when Hellman did visit, she greeted her with, “Oh, Lilly, come in quick. I want to laugh again,” instead of the reproaches Lillian was expecting. When Dorothy was on a binge, she sometimes instructed the hotel switchboard to take her calls, but more often the drinking was unpremeditated and she forgot. When Joseph Bryan telephoned to inquire how she was doing, she sounded friendly and then all at once, for no apparent reason, began to curse him as “a no-good, fascist son of a bitch.”

  The world seemed to be shrinking. Few new people entered her life and the political friends she once had called “my own people” had quietly dropped from sight. Some of them would have agreed with Hellman when she later wrote that Dorothy’s eccentricities, once so amusing, had become “too strange for safety or comfort.” Dorothy tried to accept their being dead or busy or living some new incarnation. Still remaining were the Mostels and the Perelmans, whose company she continued to enjoy. The fall she returned to New York, she was greatly saddened to learn of Gerald Murphy’s death and sent Sara a telegram that simply read, DEAREST SARA, DEAREST SARA. Although Sara spent her summers at East Hampton, she kept a city apartment for the winters and now lived at the Volney with a nurse. While Dorothy saw Sara often and permitted expressions of motherly concern over her health and appetite, her closest companion continued to be Bea Stewart, who had never figured among “my own people,” who c
ared not two cents for politics, but who had permitted Dorothy to lean on her whenever she liked for some forty years. Bea, unlike the others, never pulled a face when Dorothy reached for the Scotch.

  Around close friends she did not trouble to conceal the black moods that sometimes enveloped her, times when she needed to sound off about her many afflictions and privations. She complained to Wyatt Cooper about how she really deserved to be dead because “everybody I ever cared about is dead.” An afternoon with Fred Shroyer provoked a similar litany of small frustrations and major disasters. As he was leaving, she kissed him goodbye and whispered theatrically, “Listen, Fred, don’t feel badly when I die, because I’ve been dead for a long time.” He left feeling totally sorry for her. That bit of gallows humor was wicked of her, but she had few pleasures left in life.

  In the early months of 1967, her situation looked bright. At last it seemed as if Leah Salisbury’s years of work were going to pay off in a Broadway production. Marcella Cisney, who with her husband operated a theater company at the University of Michigan, had organized a script based on Dorothy’s poems and stories as well as more recent writings from The New Yorker and. Cisney was a respected director who had conceived a similar production based on the poetry and letters of Robert Frost, a production that had been tried out at Michigan before its New York opening. Her production proposal for A Dorothy Parker Portfolio included Cole Porter’s music, sets based on the sketches of New Yorker artists such as Peter Arno and William Steig, and a cast starring Julie Harris and backed up by such versatile performers as Tom Ewell and Anne Jackson.

  In Salisbury’s judgment, Cisney’s idea was worth pursuing and encouraging. When she brought her to the Volney to read the script, Dorothy could not have been more “delighted” and gave the project her enthusiastic endorsement. She particularly liked the thought of Julie Harris as her prototype. As the months passed and the details were worked out, Dorothy’s excitement mounted. Cisney planned to open the show at Ann Arbor’s 1967—1968 season, give Dorothy one thousand dollars in advance royalties, and then negotiate a Dramatists Guild contract for a Broadway production. In the meantime, she asked Dorothy to attend rehearsals in Ann Arbor and offer suggestions.

  The prospect of a Broadway show buoyed her spirits. She also hoped that it might alleviate her money worries. Lately she had been thinking about the future, wondering how she was going to conserve her nest egg. The result of her stewing was a decision to move to a smaller, cheaper apartment on the sixth floor. This meant a savings of twenty-five dollars a month, but having made the switch she immediately regretted it. The new apartment was not nearly as pleasant as 8E.

  For a while that winter she went out frequently. Friends took her to see Sherry, a Broadway musical based on The Man Who Came to Dinner. Afterward, they went to the Oak Room at the Plaza, where she held court and was delighted to be spotted by Broadway columnist Leonard Lyons. That sort of adventure happened rarely. More often she spent quiet times with Sara Murphy or evenings at Bea Stewart’s apartment six blocks away. A color snapshot taken by Bea showed that Dorothy liked to dress up for these outings. She wore a smart navy blue dress, and her hair and makeup had been obviously done with care. As always, her poodle was seated on her lap. Evenings at Bea’s customarily ended with Dorothy’s opening her purse and making a woebegone face. She had no change for a cab. The ritual would end with her accepting a dollar or two.

  Even though she felt energetic, she continued to grumble about her terrible life. She was as good as dead. “I can’t write, I can’t write,” she would moan. When it was proposed that she might want to reminisce about her life by dictating the story to Wyatt Cooper, she surprised everyone by agreeing. It would give her, she said, “something to live for,” and she assured Cooper she would keep the narrative “gay”; otherwise there would be no point in telling it. The tapings were, in fact, somewhat of a strain. After three sessions, they gave up the project. Possibly Dorothy found them fun because she had an opportunity to demolish her father and practically every other human being whose path had crossed hers, but Cooper derived little satisfaction. Unable to accept her stories as the truth, he concluded that the recollections had to be “creative exaggerations.”

  In March, Gloria and Wyatt Cooper gave a party in her honor. This resulted from her having missed an earlier invitation, when a blizzard had dumped a foot of snow on the city and she had been unable to navigate the storm. Aware of her disappointment, the Coopers proposed a special party for her and promised to invite glamorous, interesting people whose company she would enjoy.

  “My wife,” wrote Cooper, “was, of course, fascinated by Dottie, and somewhat worshipful, an attitude that was mutual.... Dottie was always at her most genteel in my wife’s presence, with malice toward none and charity for all.” It was true that her manner toward Gloria Vanderbilt could not have been more conventionally correct, as it would have been with any of the socialites whose lives she followed in Women’s Wear Daily and ripped to shreds with such relish. Gloria’s rather imperious manner made her smile. She had taken to calling her “Gloria the Vth.”

  In the following weeks, invitations were extended to a dozen couples, including Mr. and Mrs. William Paley, Mr. and Mrs. Louis Auchincloss, Mr. and Mrs. Gardner Cowles, and Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Peabody, among other notables. None of Dorothy’s friends were asked.

  “Have you been invited?” Dorothy demanded of Parker Ladd, who happened to be a friend of both hers and the Coopers.

  “No,” he answered, he had not.

  “Well, I’m not going either,” she swore. “Those are just not my kind of people.”

  In reality, nothing could have prevented her acceptance. What troubled her was having nothing to wear, at least nothing worthy of such a fine occasion. When the Coopers realized this, they quickly provided a suitable costume. Gloria Vanderbilt sent over a size-three gold-brocade caftan beaded with tiny pearls. Dorothy found it enchanting. Even though the dress was six inches too long, she refused to have it shortened, because she thought it made her look like a Chinese empress. A last-minute crisis, the realization that she lacked matching shoes and handbag, was averted by Sara Murphy, who escorted her to Lord & Taylor to purchase accessories and then treated her to tea at Schrafft’s, a favor that did not prevent Dorothy from complaining afterward about the department store, Sara’s taste in restaurants, and the nurse who accompanied Sara everywhere.

  At the Coopers, seated between Wyatt and Louis Auchincloss, Dorothy had to admit that Gloria Vanderbilt certainly knew how to give a dinner party. The display of flowers, the red tablecloths, and silver gleaming under the candlelight looked splendid. Everyone was dressed to the teeth. Dorothy studied the details of gowns, jewels, and coiffures, the better to savor and recall later for curious friends. Although she performed her part with grace and dignity, from time to time her inhibitions loosened and she let slip an unexpected remark. When another guest delivered an accolade on the beauty of the wine goblets, pointing out that wine always tasted so much better in lovely glasses, Dorothy was quick to agree.

  “Oh, yes,” she fluted, “paper cups aren’t right.” It was at this moment that Wyatt Cooper, who had been finding it difficult to converse with her under these formal circumstances, was suddenly seized by an attack of nervous coughing.

  On her other side, Louis Auchincloss was having a frustrating evening, because the noise at the table drowned out Dorothy’s soft voice. “I could not hear a word she said. I have never been more sadly disappointed in a social occasion in my life. I admired her so much and we could not communicate!”

  To Dorothy there was little real communication with anyone at the dinner—the percussion of all that invisible money was deafening. In the days after the fete, she expressed her disdain for the whole business by verbally garrotting practically everyone present.

  Bea Stewart’s telephone rang in the late afternoon on Wednesday, June 7. “She’s gone,” announced a desk clerk calling from the Volney.

  Stewa
rt took this to mean that Dorothy changed her mind about apartment 6F and impulsively moved elsewhere. But it was not that at all. Mrs. Parker died that afternoon, he informed her. A chambermaid discovered the body.

  Stewart was astounded. The previous week Dorothy seemed tired, although not so tired that she stopped enjoying Scotch or Chesterfields. When Bea stopped by, she found Dorothy sitting up in bed and thought that all she needed was a rest. Never had she suspected the end was approaching.

  She called the Volney back and asked them to enter Dorothy’s apartment and remove the dog. Dorothy would not want the police to impound Troy. When Stewart arrived at the hotel, the poodle was safely stored in another apartment, and the authorities were present on the scene. Dorothy lay in bed under a sheet. When Lillian Hellman arrived a short while later, she answered the medical examiner’s questions and called the newspapers—the cause of death had been a heart attack. By this time, Stewart was on her way home with Troy.