The Last Days of Dorothy Parker

by Marion Meade

  •

  Norma Place covered a single block, from North Doheny to Hilldale, with a bank and post office at one end and small apartment buildings at the other. The street, located in West Hollywood and supposedly named after the silent-screen star Norma Talmadge, was known as Boys Town because its residents, men with muscular bodies and flawless tans, were primarily gay.

  It was a leafy green neighborhood of 1920s vintage cottages set on small lots with neat front yards and narrow, unpaved driveways. Alan Campbell scraped together enough to purchase a tidy two-bedroom, one-bath home at number 8983, possibly lending some credibility to rumors of his bisexuality, but more likely because he was drawn to the vibrant atmosphere. In his late fifties, he was a sociable, physically attractive gentleman who, a neighbor recalled, did not appear to be a practicing homosexual, nor did he seem to be romantically coupled with women either.

  In the spring of 1961, Dottie took up residence with Alan on Norma Place. Not that she changed her mind about marriage – it wasn’t any fresh start with him that tempted her back to Hollywood; it was, in fact, money.

  In recent months, Alan’s fortunes had taken a turn for the better when he began getting movie work again. His last job on a feature was a low-budget Universal film (Woman on the Run) in 1950; throughout the fifties he had eked out a modest living from television (The Jack Benny Program, Lux Video Theatre). On the verge of getting a break – the possibility of employment at Fox – he urged Dottie to join him. The movie was an upcoming star vehicle for Marilyn Monroe, an adaptation of a French comedy called The Good Soup, but getting hired depended entirely on Dottie’s collaboration. To Alan’s optimistic thinking, a Monroe picture could not help but do well, and further assignments could be expected. It was not too late, he believed, to reestablish themselves as the successful comedy duo of the thirties, the team whose work on A Star Is Born yielded them an Oscar nomination. To a professional pessimist like Dottie, invariably prepared for the possibility of failure, the idea must have been hard to imagine. Yet, what mattered was that his starry-eyed strategy appeared halfway promising for the short term. Whether it would continue indefinitely remained to be seen.

  Over the years Dottie had learned a lot about Hollywood, and what she knew was that she hated the place. Still, the Fox job meant good money and the satisfaction of lucrative paychecks for the foreseeable future, security that had been missing from her life. Obviously there were other factors to consider: much-needed dental work that she’d been postponing and Alan’s agreement that she could have a nice bedroom of her own. And, of course, the weather was glorious.

  A fiscally prudent individual, Alan owned a handful of stocks, two insurance policies, some real estate in Virginia, and with his good credit had no problem obtaining a mortgage. Brimming with home improvement projects, he intended to add a second bathroom and convert the garage into a rental apartment. It was a far cry from the glory days of swimming pools and Picassos, but if living grandly was no longer possible, he still wished to live well, and what he fancied next was a Jaguar, preferably dark green.

  The decision to return was terrifying, and yet Dottie had little to lose. At the time nothing was happening for her in New York. Her ideas, it seemed, were passé; her writing, she believed, had gone out of style. In the end, the deciding factor was not “20th Century Fucks,” as she called the studio, or The Good Soup, fluff that had flopped on Broadway, but its star. She was smitten with Marilyn Monroe – “I am crazy about her”69 – and could not pass up the enticing opportunity to write a Monroe film. Of course, starting over with Alan was risky. It had been some years since they worked or lived together, and the brief second marriage had tested the limits of her patience.

  In no time at all, she settled into the community, or, as she liked to call it, “Peyton Place West.” Along Norma Place she became a familiar figure being ferried around in the Jaguar by her husband or walking her poodle Cliché along with a new Sealyham puppy. Soon she was making new friends, chatting up her gay neighbors, holding court at their frequent cocktail parties. Perhaps most important, she made the acquaintance of a cheerful young man living down the street, another writer working at Fox. Of all the people she met, it was Wyatt Cooper who would be the bright spot in her life on Norma Place.

  Raised on a farm in Quitman, Mississippi, one of nine children, Wyatt grew up in a family that might well have come out of a Faulkner novel. Dottie, accordingly, nicknamed him the Sharecropper. As a child he was emotionally scarred by a tyrannical, womanizing father who told him “You’re no damn good,” and whose typical advice was backwoods basic: “Take a leak as soon as you finish & always wash it off with soap and water.”70

  From his harrowing early years, Wyatt had matured into a caring, uncommonly sensitive man, one of the kindest people Dottie knew. She delighted in his company because, happily, he understood what was funny, and like herself loved giggling and swapping gossipy shoptalk, the more outrageous the better. The farmer’s son with the boyish smile was thirty-four but appeared ten years younger. As if unaware of the three decades between them, he treated her like a contemporary. If Dottie had succeeded in having a baby, and if it were a son, she would have wanted a boy like Wyatt.

  At the studio, Dottie and Alan and Wyatt fell into the habit of lunching together. Bypassing the commissary, they trawled around the area looking for amusing restaurants and stores. One day while browsing in a Santa Monica antique shop, Dottie caught sight of a set of hand-painted porcelain figurines, Napoleon and his marshals, the courageous men who led his battles. Endlessly fascinating to her were, not just the campaigns, but also Napoleon’s career, his family, and his exile to Elba. The generals were nine inches high, and she wanted all thirteen of them. To display the miniatures in style, Alan put up a shelf in the living room and installed a special overhead light.

  Wyatt was struck by how much fun the pair had together, “as they must have done in earlier and younger days.”71 Of course they bickered, but even so, their solidarity was obvious. At the studio, they had no trouble coming up with, as Dottie called it, “a darling, bawdy farce” for Marilyn.72 In their little house, where they chose not to own a TV set, evenings were spent leisurely reading, chain-smoking, and sipping Scotch; as before, she did not involve herself in housekeeping or cooking. After Cliché had puppies there were five dogs on the premises (Alan had little patience with the messes). For the fourth year she continued to entertain Esquire readers with her witty book column (“This novel,” she said admiringly of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, “brings back all my faith in terror and death.”73) For a person who never admitted knowing happiness, who had a lifelong love affair with negativity, she had found a surprising degree of contentment.

  During this period, Dottie saw nothing of Lilly. There was her aversion to Alan but also the fact that Dottie made no trips back to New York, and so their contacts were necessarily limited to phone calls or letters. A sort of liaison between them was Peter Feibleman, Lilly’s youthful protégé, who coincidentally lived a few houses down the street and sometimes would stop for a drink. From Peter, Dottie learned that Lilly was teaching at Harvard and that she was elected vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, an impressive honor. Likewise, information traveled the opposite direction because Lilly kept tabs on Dottie, asking for news and generally ending with the question of money. Did she have enough? She was living on “a shoestring,” Feibleman reported.74

  The Campbells may have appeared pinched to Peter and Lilly, but they were hardly living hand to mouth; indeed, they were no worse off than any working-class couple. They were doing their best, given the circumstances. The shoestring continued to hold nicely.

  Until it snapped. As happened all the time in Hollywood, the studio followed standard procedure and turned over their script to additional writers. Dottie, however, could not pretend to take it in stride and told friends that she felt “sickened.” As she des
cribed it, ‘hired swine burned the pot” and turned The Good Soup into “a kind of gaudy gazpacho.” Turned out, it didn’t matter. The Campbells found themselves off the Fox payroll but so was Marilyn, fired from her current film Something’s Got to Give and slapped with a half-million-dollar lawsuit. She was supposed to be ill. Disgusted but philosophical, Dottie allowed that Monroe might have been a problem. “Of course, Marilyn can’t help her behavior. She is always in terror.” A few months later, Monroe was dead and The Good Soup shelved forever.75 Who, in her right mind, could have predicted such an improbable outcome?

  The reconciliation that had begun with so much promise in 1961 quickly dribbled away, only to be replaced eighteen months later by perpetual friction. Living together as housemates had become far more perilous than either of them expected. Wyatt Cooper, accustomed to their genial crabbiness, was distressed to find them sometimes at each other’s throats.

  Once the movie money disappeared, the ground shifted beneath them and the days became purposeless, with too much time on their hands and too much dependence on alcohol. No assignments were forthcoming. Alan may have tried and failed, but then he stopped trying. For a brief period Dottie taught a class at California State University, but eventually they were living on unemployment insurance, her royalties, and checks from Esquire, which had raised her rate from $600 to $750 a month and generously paid whether or not she submitted a column. Frequently she was late, or sent nothing, even though she claimed to be working. Sometimes, distrustful, Alan played crafty games. At one point, he placed a hair on her typewriter, assuring Wyatt that “when I get back it’ll still be there.”76 Other times, he loaded stacks of unread review copies into his Jaguar and made the rounds of local bookshops. He can be excused for feeling nervous because the end of unemployment benefits was looming.

  By the spring of 1963 the cracks in their relationship were getting hard to hide. Alan, increasingly grouchy, made no effort to look for work and typically started off the day drinking. Dottie retaliated by jabbing him with old insults, telling him harshly that he was hopeless, a horse’s ass, a writer of dubious achievements still clinging to her coattail. Her browbeating made him tear up.

  “He used to be able to drink and still have fun,” she told Wyatt, ignoring her own overindulgence in Scotch. But Alan, who had shut down, was not much of a party guy anymore.

  When the actress Cathleen Nesbitt was invited to supper, Alan got mumbly drunk. Hustling back and forth to the kitchen, he finally dished up a ruinous meal of burned roast and salad garnished with – what the hell was that? – speckles of aluminum foil.

  •

  On June 14, Dottie had been at the hairdresser. When she returned home in the late afternoon, Alan lay sleeping, curled in a fetal ball, knees folded up. A plastic dry-cleaners bag was wrapped around his neck. Then she saw that he was dead. There were Seconals spilled on the rug next to the bed, and when she shook him he was already stiff.

  To those who came swooping into the house that night in June 1963, the procession of neighbors, the police, and the ambulance crew – and to those she phoned, such as Lilly in New York and Wyatt somewhere or other in Alabama – Dottie denied that Alan had killed himself. Before dozing off for his nap, which he had done untold hundreds of times, he must have lost track of the Seconals he’d taken. Another thing: he left no suicide note.

  That Friday morning he’d been drinking Bloody Marys. He was plastered, recalled their maid Clara Lester, who described him as “drunk as a skunk.”77 In the expert opinion of the State of California Department of Health, Alan’s death was caused by “acute barbiturate poisoning due to an ingestion of an overdose.” Its conclusion (which Dottie would always dispute): “probable suicide.”

  That evening she talked mindlessly, having no patience with those who tried to comfort her. What appeared to be understandable shock and bereavement was blended with an even more powerful emotion: outrage. After twenty-nine years he had left her, once again. Without saying boo, not so much as a fare-thee-well, he’d simply toddled away.

  Everybody was eager to help, but Dottie had nothing to suggest.

  “What can I do?” a neighbor purred.

  Dottie turned to her and said, “Get me a new husband.”78

  The woman was shocked.

  “Then run down to the corner and get me a ham and cheese on rye. And tell them to hold the mayo.”

  An ambulance came to take Alan away. Still, people continued to stand around elbow to elbow, fixing themselves drinks and giving her hugs.

  She had always told herself that the worst to befall people were not the tragedies of life but the messes. Make no mistake: what happened to Alan may have been the result of a time bomb that had been ticking for months, but it also was the cruelest, most unforgiveable kind of sloppiness. He had fled, leaving her to clean up the mess.

  Chapter 5

  UPPER EAST SIDE

  (1964–1967)

  It was chilly when Dottie straggled home, her plane landing at an airport called Idlewild when she’d left but rechristened John F. Kennedy International in her absence. In the heart of town, bare trees stretched across a dirty gray sky, and the March temperatures barely topped thirty degrees. Her last months in Hollywood had passed in a blur of sticky heat, a painful broken shoulder, and the obligation to tidy up Alan’s mess. Finally, his things had been shipped to his mother in Virginia, the dogs given away, the bank accounts closed, the house, car, and furnishings disposed of, the clutter cleared. “A clean sweep,” she called her attempt to purge herself of the things associated with Alan.79 Free again, her suitcases bulging with the total of her earthly possessions (including the cherished Napoleon generals), the seventy-year-old exile rented a furnished one-bedroom apartment in the Volney.

  Located on the fashionable Upper East Side, the Volney was the kind of place where white-gloved widows and refined divorcées lived with cherished pets. (Dottie’s poodle Cliché had died, but she still had one of her puppies, Troisième “Troy”). Apartment 8E had the minimalist look of a dentist’s waiting room, and some of Dottie’s visitors were to remember bare walls, a scarcity of knickknacks, hardly a few framed photos and books. Common to the elderly, she had pared down her surroundings, perhaps unconsciously, although fripperies of any kind had never much interested her. It was Alan, a lover of objects, who had adored decorating. Her apartment was unpretentious with a kitchenette and a dining table wedged into the corner of the living room. Did she long for the vanished house and pool on North Canon Drive, her comfortable fieldstone farmhouse in Pennsylvania with its apple orchards? Probably not.

  The first months were difficult. Weighing eighty pounds and suffering from malnutrition, she resembled some survivor of the Bataan Death March. Her arm was in a sling, her eyes were failing. It took two or three packs of Chesterfields to get through the day. “I should be dead,” she would say, not entirely in jest, after a few Scotches, and sometimes before.80

  As if the broken shoulder wasn’t enough, other debilitating ailments arose: bursitis, pneumonia, and poor balance leading to falls and fractures that sent her to the hospital more than once and weakened her self-confidence. Everything seemed to go haywire. Unable to dress, bathe, or feed herself, she needed the care of a practical nurse. For many months she found herself cooped up in 8E with a middle-aged woman in a uniform and organdy apron, who bossed her around, talked endlessly, and covered the dining table in plastic. Before long, the enforced intimacy was driving her nuts. In despair, she bought a television set and kept it on all day to escape the nurse’s chatter. Whiling away the hours, she soon became a regular viewer of soap operas, particularly As the World Turns.

  Among her most serious worries was money. After settling Alan’s estate, she had felt optimistic. In addition to the proceeds from the house and car, there was a life insurance policy and sale of stock certificates. Armed with $41,500 from the estate, combined with her own income from royalties an
d options, she understood that her nest egg was not a fortune – far from it, in fact – but hopefully enough to get by if she was frugal. Missing was a reserve for emergencies, and because she was ill and faced with hospital and nursing bills, she sometimes required help from friends. (Medicare would not begin for another two years.)

  In the meantime, trying to get well, she found no energy for work. “I can’t use my typewriter,” she told a visitor, because she might as well have tried to climb Mount Everest.81 Although lifting her arms took immense effort, she found it possible to write with a pencil. One of her final pieces, published in Esquire, was a lengthy caption to accompany paintings of John Koch. In a poignant reverie titled “New York at 6:30 P.M.,” she returned to a departed time when she was growing up, replaying in her head the sweet moments when dusk fell across the city, when hostesses who had stepped from the pages of Edith Wharton were presiding over traditional drawing rooms, whose curtains had not yet been drawn and whose fires were being lit in real fireplaces. “There is no such hour on the present clock as 6:30 New York time,” she wrote. “Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you’ll live through the night.”82

  Struggling herself to get through the twilight, she was surprised to realize how much she had aged. She had expected her demise, even tried to hasten its arrival when she was thirty, and thirty-three, and thirty-nine, not counting one halfhearted attempt to kill herself with shoe polish at thirty-six. But what she had not imagined was decay, discovering herself an old woman in a cotton housedress and flapping slippers, dependent on strangers to wipe her behind. This is the part of her life that biographers would skip over.