by Marion Meade
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In mid-August of 1937, Dottie and Alan set sail for France with Lilly, anticipating a festive Parisian vacation. Checking into the five-star Hotel Le Meurice overlooking the Tuileries Garden, they found themselves in a crowded city partying hysterically as it simultaneously hosted the World Exhibition and trembled in the shadow of war. As Lilly quickly discovered, nobody had more street credibility among the expatriates than Dottie, and her affectionate friends jockeyed to shower her with love and a great many invitations. There was a sentimental reunion with old friends like Sara and Gerald Murphy, as well as nostalgic evenings in Les Deux Magots and La Closerie des Lilas, still the favored hangouts of Americans in Paris.
“Fine time” is the phrase Lilly used to describe those first days of rushing around to dinner parties and country luncheons.39 Unfortunately, the fine time was short-lived. In the spotlight since her Broadway success, she had grown accustomed to people fussing over her, but here she found herself treated with indifference by this crowd of self-absorbed expatriates with money. Her days of going unnoticed were over, but these people brought it back. It was painful to realize that her own admirers were “second-class stuff” compared to Dottie’s fans.40 Uncomfortable, truthfully more than a little jealous, she disliked playing second fiddle and compensated by pouting and drinking too much. Among those who got under her skin were the Murphys and their circle of prominent artists, musicians, and sleek sporty lesbians. But the one who annoyed her most was Alan Campbell, “a hard man for me to take,” she admitted.41 He impressed her as snobbish, fussy, hopelessly overbearing, and presumably a gay closet case. By this time, she hated his guts.
Apologetic for snapping at him, she told Dottie that she simply couldn’t help it because he made her nervous.
Dottie shrugged. “Dear Lilly, you’d be a psychotic if he didn’t.”42 She herself bickered with her husband, who was never at a want for words.
Alan vanished every afternoon. Where was he? Lilly asked.
“Takes a sleeping pill,” said Dottie. “He hates to toss and turn from four to six.”
Meantime, there was plenty besides Alan to worry about. All around them Europe was in turmoil. Nazi Germany, whose armies had marched into the Rhineland, was on the brink of annexing Austria. And the civil war in Spain, in its fourteenth month, seemed like a prelude to a second world war. Fierce fighting and air strikes around the beleaguered capital of Madrid had failed, and the Republican government was forced to Valencia. The last place Dottie had intended on visiting was a combat zone because, she frankly admitted, she was “scared stiff” of getting her head blown off.43 What’s more, she worried about visiting a country where people were starving. How could she possibly eat their food? An American journalist just back from Madrid would not listen to her excuses because the obvious solution was to go bearing donations of food for the Spanish and eat the local diet. On September 20, the Campbells ditched Lilly and departed for Madrid, their bags loaded with canned hams and chicken and beef stew, Kraft Welsh rarebit, and Horlicks malted milk.
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On a late Sunday afternoon in October 1937, darkness had begun falling. Dottie was drinking vermouth with a lump of gray ice, a luxury in wartime, and gazing around the congested café. After a few days in Madrid, she and Alan had come to Valencia, a place where air raids could occur at any moment. Unnerved by the bombs, she could barely manage to smile. “There are things that never have been funny,” she decided, “and never will be.”44 It was a working-class café, clamorous with families, even babies, and soldiers in faded uniforms, on a brief respite from the carnage at the front.
Aided by a Swedish interpreter, she was able to exchange words with soldiers at a nearby table, men who had spent nearly a year living through circumstances beyond their control. She expected them to talk about the war. But as the restaurant around them buzzed with chatter, they spoke grievously of missing their homes and their families, not knowing if their wives and children were dead or alive. What they didn’t mention was the fighting. After they left, Dottie was shocked to discover that the soldiers had paid for her vermouth.
Five months later, when her beautifully told memory of this gloomy Sunday afternoon and the men she had met was published, the New Yorker labeled “Soldiers of the Republic” as fiction.
Midway through October, Lilly followed in the Campbells’ footsteps. Her stay of three weeks, recounted in a thirty-page travel diary, would eventually appear in print decades later. Disappointingly, there was less about air raids than the kind of gee-whiz details recorded by tourists, things that may have seemed exotic at the moment but sound trivial afterward. One night in Madrid she was invited to dinner by Ernest Hemingway and his girlfriend and future wife, the journalist Martha Gellhorn. The meal, she wrote, was notable for excellent wine and tough beef. The fiancé was dismissed as a pretty woman with good taste in clothing. When shelling began, Lilly couldn’t bring herself to watch. She shut her eyes in panic and stayed well away from the window.
If Lilly was catty about Martha Gellhorn, Gellhorn was inclined to believe the worst about Lilly and would question the authenticity of everything she wrote about her expedition to Spain. To Martha, she not only had swanned around like a crass tourist but was also a “dull” woman who did not tell the truth.
Lilly was lonely after the Campbells returned to their farm in Pennsylvania. Hanging around a war by herself was not the holiday she had envisioned, so she soon headed home. In New York she celebrated at “21” Club with ex-husband Arthur Kober because Dash was in Hollywood after finally getting a Mexican divorce. The trip, she decided, had made her cranky because “Paris was never my city,” no matter how beloved by Dottie and her friends.45 It was the last time they traveled together. As for Dottie’s husband, she thought of him as a “fairy-shit” and tried to avoid his company.46
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Before Dottie and Alan visited Spain, they had been employed by Samuel Goldwyn earning a weekly salary of $5,200, the equivalent of about $90,000 in today’s money. For this seductive paycheck, virtually unparalleled in 1937, they worked on ghastly scripts and attended untold numbers of story meetings, in which Dottie, bored the hell out of her mind, passed the time by knitting. Often she found herself at odds with Goldwyn, who thought little of her suggestions and once yelled at her in a room full of writers, “God damn it, Dottie! You and your God damn sophisticated jokes.” He was in the business of entertaining, he said. Too bad she knew nothing about audiences and what they wanted. People didn’t go to the movies for high-minded ideas. They didn’t pay money for jokes either. They simply wanted happy endings.
Arguing was useless. But Dottie, hackles up, roused herself. “I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.” She walked out in utter disgust.
Goldwyn looked around, bewildered. “Does anybody in here know what the hell that woman was talking about?”47 Everybody knew; nobody was going out of his way to explain. Actually, endings didn’t matter. What did matter was the money.
The gold-plated contract turned out to be short-lived, and when Goldwyn suddenly dropped their option in August of 1937, they retreated to their farm.
Lilly, meanwhile, continuing to make her home in New York, also worked for Sam Goldwyn. Unlike the Campbells, she had never felt comfortable putting down roots in Los Angeles, and neither was she satisfied seeing her name on drek. How could she make Goldwyn money on Broadway? There she had done her best only to produce a humiliating mess with Days to Come. She decided to try again.
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“I hope you die!” Regina tells her husband. “I hope you die soon! I’ll be waiting for you to die!”48
In her parlor sits Regina Hubbard Giddens, watching as a sick man with a bad heart drops his medicine bottle. Horace asks her to go upstairs to his room for another bottle. Continuing to watch
, Regina allows him to die.
The period drama, set in a small Southern town in 1900, charts the disintegration of the Hubbard clan, rapacious wolves who hate each other, and centers on the schemes of sister Regina, famously played by Tallulah Bankhead and later Bette Davis in the film, to snatch power from her brothers, even if it means ending up alone. Apparently, the Newhouses, Lilly’s rich blood relatives on her mother’s side, were the inspiration for The Little Foxes.49
Her best-known work, The Little Foxes ran 410 performances on Broadway and continues to be revived to the present day. Its success not only established Lilly’s position as an important playwright – she would be called America’s Ibsen – but also made her rich. She bought an estate on the outskirts of Pleasantville, New York, a property of 130 acres with an 1810 house, woods full of deer, and a lake with three islands. At Hardscrabble Farm, she planted a vegetable garden and took up raising chickens (and selling the eggs). Partly this blissful rural retreat thirty-five miles from the city was purchased with thoughts of Hammett, who enjoyed country life and would spend time there over the next dozen years, not as family, but as a remote semipermanent houseguest who had little to offer her.
By the late 1930s, quite a few Hollywood screenwriters were seeking healthy antidotes to the artifice of Beverly Hills by purchasing agricultural property. For a while, Dottie, who had come to loathe Hollywood, had been experiencing a nesting urge. Having not given up the hope of raising a family, still trying to get pregnant after a miscarriage, she wanted a permanent home. So often did she repeat the word “roots,” usually after several martinis, that her nagging began to irritate her husband. “We haven’t any roots, Alan. You can’t put down roots in Beverly Hills.”50 In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, overlooking the Delaware River Valley, they found an 111-acre farm whose purchase price of a mere $4,500 was less than one week’s salary. Unlike Hardscrabble Farm, Fox House was totally uninhabitable and needed extensive renovation. Still, the expense was worth it because the result was an elaborate fourteen-room showplace. They hired a farmer to run the place, which was also worth it.
Clocking in at the studio was tricky when you lived thousands of miles away. Not for crack screenwriters, however, because by the late 1930s air travel had become more common and they could easily afford to fly. Whenever Dottie or Lilly had a writing job on the Coast, they shuttled back on a cross-country flight and simply settled down for months on end at a luxurious hotel. In 1940, the census taker would catch up with the Campbells comfortably ensconced at the Garden of Allah on Sunset Boulevard.
For the two friends, the late 1930s and early 1940s would be the best of times, at least superficially. Lilly enjoyed another Broadway success, Watch on the Rhine, while Dottie (and Alan) received an Academy Award nomination for A Star Is Born. As two of the most famous women writers of their day, their personalities became as familiar to the public as movie stars. Thanks to immense incomes, they too had privileged existences whose essence was excess: high-end real estate, deluxe cars, sophisticated friends, lavish soirees. In published photographs the two of them sometimes appear together sporting similar outfits, big wide-brim hats and smashing ankle-length fur coats.
On Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Lilly purchased a six-story neo-Georgian townhouse and, later on, a house on Martha’s Vineyard. Her income continued to rise, and by the midforties she was earning, for example, almost two million dollars in today’s currency. In Bucks County, Alan Campbell bought his mother a home nearby; and he also imported a live-in servant from Richmond to drive the Packard. As the only black uniformed chauffeur the locals had ever seen, the man quickly became a novelty.
Indefatigable Communists, the friends continued to embrace blue-collar issues. Ordinary men and women appeared in Dottie’s fiction (“Clothe the Naked,” “The Standard of Living”) and in some of Lilly’s dramas (the ill-fated Days to Come), but the only working-class people in their real lives were the servants, black and white, whom they employed. Everyday Angelenos – the Hollywood flotsam and jetsam, the self-help cults, the health-food nuts who found their way into Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust – never reached their radar.
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“Constant use had not worn ragged the fabric of their friendship,” Dottie wrote.51 She was referring, not to herself and Lilly, but to a pair of young women named Annabel and Midge who were “surely born to be comrades.”
Stenographers in the same office, Annabel and Midge are best friends, whose desks sit companionably side by side. Boyfriends come and go, but the pair remain inseparable. On Saturday afternoons they stroll along Fifth Avenue playing their favorite game, doing what young women do when they have no money and nothing better to do: pretending somebody has died and left them each a million dollars to spend on themselves. Spying a double rope of pearls in a jewelry store window, presumably Tiffany’s, they muster the courage to go inside, only to learn the price is a quarter-million dollars. Unlike Truman Capote’s good-time girl who zips off to Tiffany’s for breakfast,52 Dottie’s heroines are working girls who have never visited the Stork Club or accepted money from men. They earn less than twenty dollars a week typing and taking dictation, and they live at home with their parents.
Midge and Annabel were comrades in “The Standard of Living,” a story of Dottie’s published by the New Yorker in 1941. By this time, she and Lilly had been comrades for seven years and, like the fictional secretaries, the fabric of their friendship remained unchanged; in fact, it was stronger than ever. What could be more natural than to dedicate her new volume of stories to Lilly, whom she held in high regard for both her political commitment and her talent as a playwright. (Here Lies, her seventh book, would be her last.) The following year, she composed an effusive foreword for a special edition of Lilly’s play, Watch on the Rhine, to benefit the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (a group later designated to be a Communist front by the House Un-American Activities Committee or HUAC).
Most of all, they had fun together. There was plenty of teasing and laughing at each other’s jokes, no matter how lame. Their repartee amused not only each other but anybody within earshot. One time it was a ribald afternoon-long contest over which one had slept with the most awful men. Dottie proclaimed herself the winner; Lilly insisted she was bragging. Another time, after a party in honor of Helen Keller, which Dottie had declined to attend, Lilly came home disgusted by the pious chatter. What a waste of time, she complained. Without looking up from a book, Dottie said mildly, “It’s your own fault, dear. Didn’t I tell you she was a con woman and a dyke?”53 Peter Feibleman, the writer who was Lilly’s protégé, called them “a perfectly matched pair, a kind of intellectual vaudeville team.”
Notwithstanding their perfect match, the bond between them depended on censoring anything disagreeable. In contrast to Lilly’s theatrical blowups with practically everybody she knew, she uncharacteristically muzzled herself around Dottie. Hurt feelings were not voiced, disappointments not confronted, and good manners unfailingly observed. Quenching anger and nursing grudges, they carefully avoided getting into fights. Lilly liked to insist that they never once exchanged “even a mild, unpleasant word,” but it would turn out that she was quietly keeping score.54 When her father died, she made a list of those friends who had sent condolences. Dottie, she noted, did not.
It seemed clear to the playwright Ruth Goetz, a friend of both women, that Dottie admired Lilly, “but Lillian did not admire Dottie because she had no admiring mechanisms, and she wasn’t generous about anything.”55 Actually, there were few women in Lilly’s life simply because she didn’t like her own sex and saw no reason to be kind. She viewed women with suspicion, sometimes treating them savagely, or as the screenwriter Frances Goodrich put it bluntly, she could “get rough.”56
The she-Hammett much preferred to be one of the boys, as if association with the female sex might brand her second-class goods. Dottie, too, was famous for hanging out with the guys at the Rou
nd Table, and her oldest best friend was a man, the humorist Robert Benchley. Significantly, one of her chief literary subjects was the male sex, but her fascination with men was seeded with comic but ruthless digs, undergirded by exasperation, if not outright animosity. She is likely to have agreed with Rebecca West’s quip that the opposite sex is primarily useful for lifting pianos. Despite half-joking remarks – “Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman”57 – she certainly was not a woman-hater, as her verses and stories attest. For one thing, she wholeheartedly enjoyed the company of women and formed numerous affectionate relationships, sometimes with quite ferocious card-carrying feminists. Also, despite her love-hungry panic around men, she wore her beliefs like a badge and made a point of joking that she’d been an ardent feminist since buffalo roamed in Central Park. Lilly, scorning sisterhood as passé, equated it with those quaint suffragettes of her mother’s generation, and when embraced by feminists in the 1970s, refused to acknowledge that the women’s movement had any importance whatsoever.
Lilly was right: she and Dottie were an odd couple and should not have been compatible. But they were.
In 1944, when Dottie’s work was collected into The Portable Dorothy Parker, she inscribed Lilly’s copy with a syrupy love letter:
“For Miss Hellman – The most beautiful, the most rich, the most chic, the most dashing, the most mysterious, the most fragrant, the most nobly-born, the most elegant, the most cryptic, the most startling, the most glorious, the most lovely – in short, for Miss Hellman (from Miss Parker).”58