The Last Days of Dorothy Parker

by Marion Meade

  •

  In early February 1965, Dottie invited Oscar Bernstien to the Volney because she decided it was time to make provisions for her estate. By coincidence, the law firm of O’Dwyer & Bernstien represented Lillian Hellman, but this played no part in her choice. Her friendship with Oscar and his wife, Rebecca, went back five decades. Of greater importance, she knew his office to be a champion of civil rights.

  There was no discussion about her last will and testament because she knew exactly what she wanted to do. There were no charitable donations, no financial bequests or sentimental gifts of trinkets to relatives and friends. In fact, just a single individual was mentioned, and he was a total stranger.

  The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a thirty-six-year-old clergyman, pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Ten years earlier, Dr. King had led the Montgomery bus boycott – the nation’s first black nonviolent demonstration – which led to the U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring laws that required segregated buses to be unconstitutional. During the yearlong boycott, King was jailed, his phone wiretapped, and his home bombed, but his cause triumphed and he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest recipient ever. At the present time, it was King who personified the struggle for civil rights, and his “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, would be considered the defining moment of the movement.

  Dottie and Dr. King had never met. Neither had she written about him, marched with him, talked about him to others, or praised his work publicly. There were no mutual friends, seemingly no personal connection whatsoever between the two. What she wished to offer him, and everything he represented, was a heartfelt version of herself, the Dorothy Parker who in her thirties had got arrested for demonstrating in Boston on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. At the Volney, her mind clear forty years later but too old to march, she contributed what she could.

  The civil rights movement had stirred her impassioned feelings of outrage over oppression, and so she had followed news of the Ku Klux Klan murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi with anguish. Two weeks after signing her will, Malcolm X would be assassinated, and that was followed in March by what would come to be known as the Bloody Sunday march to Montgomery. History came in a rush that year.

  Dottie’s assets consisted mainly of two accounts at the Chemical Bank and some fifty or sixty shares of New Yorker common stock; she owned no property or insurance policies. But in addition to the immediate bequest, she left Dr. King a gift of far greater significance: her copyrights and royalties. This meant that he would receive all profits from her work during his lifetime, and then these rights would be transferred someday, decades in the future, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

  Her decision came as no surprise to Oscar Bernstien. To be sure, a white writer leaving her estate to a black civil rights leader was highly unusual; in fact, nothing comparable sprung to mind. But under the circumstances – a widow without immediate survivors – it made sense. Knowing Dottie, it made perfect sense. As Rebecca recalled, “He understood completely what she had in mind.”83 For that matter, any friend of Dottie’s knew exactly where she stood on racism. Some forty years earlier, she had published “Arrangement in Black and White,” a story shocking at the time, in which an African American singer (thought to be Paul Robeson) is subtly humiliated at an all-white cocktail party.

  Throughout her life, Dottie had mismanaged her finances more often than not. But in organizing her death, the four-page will was a model of simplicity. Lillian Hellman was appointed executor of the estate (but did not share in the monetary award). Alternate executor was Seymour Bricker, the Los Angeles entertainment lawyer who had put Alan’s affairs in order. She had a soft spot for young Bricker who was responsible for her return to New York with money in her pocket (more than $300,000 in current dollars).

  Following the main order of business came instructions for funeral arrangements, in which she directed that “my body be cremated and that there be no funeral services, formal or informal.” Otherwise, in keeping with her lack of religious beliefs or affiliation, there were no further mandates, for example, no guidance concerning disposal of the ashes – buried, scattered – but that was not unusual.

  Having finally drawn up the will, she was in an unusually cheerful mood. Yukking up her forthcoming demise, she joked to friends that the least she could do was kick the bucket. Not to a soul did she reveal the actual contents of the will, and for that matter she did not bother to inform Lilly that she had finally put her affairs in order.

  Interestingly, when the contents did become public, it was not the choice of King that would startle her friends; it was appointing Lilly as executor. It seemed inappropriate, Ruth Goetz said, “because she had not really been a friend to Dottie” in recent years.84

  Why did she do it? “I can tell you why,” one of Hellman’s biographers declared. “Because Hellman was a shrewd businesswoman.”85

  To Dottie, the decision was merely practical. Lilly was a hard-nosed manager of her own affairs, and she also controlled Hammett’s estate after appropriating both the book revenues and the copyrights from his daughters. In her view, this was nothing but fair because she had tended him in his last years and considered herself the rightful owner, not two young women who lacked administrative skills.

  •

  By the winter of 1965 – almost a year after returning to the city – Dottie’s health had improved; the maddening nurse was finally gone. After those dark days, she was tickled to be out and about in the neighborhood, eager for some semblance of a normal life. At Zitomer Pharmacy she bought toothpaste and ordered her medicines; she clumped past the galleries and consulates on Madison Avenue, past the corner where the new Whitney Museum was rising like a dour gray UFO above the townhouses. Some days she wandered up to the Carlyle, the hotel where Marilyn Monroe snuck in to see the president, and there Dottie occasionally allowed herself a forbidden cocktail at Bemelmans Bar. Surrounded by streamlined young women trotting by in miniskirts and boots, she looked like a sack of potatoes in her dark silk dresses and sensible walking shoes. It was an outfit she once wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing, but she had to watch her pennies. She feared running out of money and decided to move to a smaller, cheaper apartment on the sixth floor.

  In the evenings she enjoyed going out but complained of receiving few quality invitations. Once there was a swanky concert and the promise of an introduction to Jacqueline Kennedy, whom she adored, but Jackie failed to show up. Another time, she found herself excluded from Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, a slight that caused her to stew for weeks even though she understood that such snubs had become inevitable.

  Again and again, doctors had warned her to give up alcohol, a cruel punishment in her view, but she made sporadic efforts at sobriety. To celebrate her seventy-second birthday, Sid and Laura Perelman threw a party that brought out many old friends. Clinking glasses with Heywood Hale Broun, she said, “Do you know what this is? Ginger ale.”86 It was pathetic. Back in the day her old self could happily party all night long on bathtub gin, cheap rotgut whiskey, homemade absinthe, cough syrup, indeed, when the spirit moved her, practically any liquid in a bottle.

  •

  A Victorian chair from The Little Foxes graced Lilly’s cool green and yellow living room on East Eighty-second Street while other rooms showcased furniture from The Children’s Hour and The Autumn Garden. This collection of antique-shop memorabilia, which included a quaint Sheraton-Hepplewhite birdcage, was a daily reminder of how high she had risen since the days when she was Lil Kober and first met the legendary wittiest woman in America.

  Except that, in real life, age and illness will eventually upend a talent for bon mots, something that Lilly was reluctant to acknowledge. A high adrenaline woman, she found Dottie’s physical deterioration terrifying.

  Although th
e Volney catered to all ages, its predominance of seniors – and the ticking-clock atmosphere – sometimes gave the impression of an old folks’ home. Apartment 6F, a claustrophobic nest where even a short visit could be uncomfortable, alarmed Lilly. In Dottie’s living room, cluttered with unread issues of the New York Times and an assortment of dog toys, the poodle constantly barked and jumped on guests. Newspapers carpeted the bathroom floor.87 Peter Feibleman tells a story about how he was puzzled seeing, on several occasions, the September 9, 1965, issue flattened to an obituary of the actress Dorothy Dandridge. He finally figured out the reason: the poodle, he said, “peed in the living room and shit behind the sofa.” Squeamish callers learned to pick their way around.

  Lilly could not begin to fathom why anybody would live this way. But of course it was much more than messy conditions; it was Dottie herself who had become a person she didn’t know. “Poor Dottie,” she told people, so that they assumed Mrs. Parker must be out of it. One of Dottie’s worshipful admirers, Nora Ephron, confessed that “all I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker.” But Lilly managed to convince her that her heroine was actually “a sad lady who misspent her life and her talent.”88

  Despite Lilly’s residence a few blocks north, she had kept her distance after Dottie’s return from the Coast. Phone calls were sporadic, visits occasional and brief. Her appointment books were clogged with professional activities and a hectic social schedule. She was a memorable hostess and party-giver, and guests were eager to dine on her cooking, a main course like leg of venison served with sweet-and-sour cabbage and “some very good red wine,” followed by a mixture of lemon and pineapple sherbets with “a nice piece of cake that isn’t too heavy.”89 She loved entertaining almost as much as she loved grumbling about the effort she had lavished on preparations, but nonetheless visitors to her immaculate townhouse could see how much attention she paid to the small details of life. On the menu at her gatherings was not only superior food – her default preoccupation – but the company of exceptional personalities brimming with witty repartee and dishing up the latest dirt. People down on their luck, momentarily or otherwise, were not likely to be invited.

  Dottie, in her heyday the darling of Manhattan hostesses, no longer fit in, of course. Neither was she invited to Vineyard Haven, which was realistic because she was too frail to do much traveling and unable to keep up. Spending time with her was no fun anymore.

  More distressing than Dottie’s apartment was her drinking, which Peter Feibleman called “hard-core. Lilly couldn’t take it.”90 Sober, Dottie was angelic. Under the influence, she could not resist the temptation to tell people what she thought of them. These outbursts made visitors uncomfortable, and Lilly was not the only one to shrink. As Ruth Goetz remembered it, an hour at the Volney could be “heavy-going.”91 Well-intentioned guests felt obliged to rescue Dottie from herself by emptying Scotch bottles behind her back. Sometimes those who phoned found that the Volney switchboard had instructions to block incoming calls. If a person did manage to get through, Dottie could be needlessly defensive, leaving one gentleman gasping when she, a woman known for elegant manners, suddenly called him a Fascist son of a bitch.

  Whenever Lilly turned up, Dottie seemed pleased to see her. “Oh, Lilly, come in quick. I want to laugh again.”92 Every time it was the same sweet smile, which naturally made Lilly feel a little guilty. In Dottie’s place, she would have been far less gracious and said, “Where have you been?”

  For Dottie, too, these indifferent reunions had become awkward because she knew full well that Lilly had dropped her. Unlike the old days, there was little to talk about, and so one of Lilly’s duty visits required a certain amount of ladylike playacting.

  There was no denying Lilly had a mean streak, and Dottie had witnessed countless blowups that caused people to cringe and run for cover. Once at Lilly’s farm the two of them were inspecting the turtle cages when their conversation turned sour over some triviality. Spoiling for a fight, Lilly insisted that Dottie was lying to her.

  Not so, Dottie answered, but clearly hoping to let it pass. At that moment a turtle’s penis suddenly snapped to attention. Without missing a beat, Dottie said, “It must be pleasant to have sex appeal for turtles. Shall I leave you alone together?”93

  “She had paid me back,” Lilly was to recall, “and all was well.” Or so she liked to think. Friends who loved her dearly tended to make allowances, and Dottie also forgave her thoughtless behavior.

  Lilly, increasingly judgmental, looked down on Dottie for roads taken – or not taken – choices that usually involved money. As a self-made woman, she had considerable disdain for people whose irresponsible management of their finances left them muddling through without sufficient income but who nevertheless insisted upon living above their means. She decided Dottie was paying too much for her apartment, even the smaller one on the sixth floor. Cheaper quarters in a less expensive neighborhood would do just as well and cut down on her expenses. While she herself could be “foolishly extravagant” in some things, she knew how to economize and always bought secondhand typewriters.94 Instead of a desk, she worked at the dining room table. Dottie’s problem, on the other hand, was that she still wanted to live like a queen.

  But more significant to their friendship than money was the passage of time. The age gap, irrelevant for so many years, was no longer possible to bridge. Dottie was a slow-moving seventy-two-year-old, whereas Lilly was a trim, fit sixty-year-old still eager for trips to Russia, flirting with younger men and hoping for sex, and swimming naked as a jaybird at Gay Head beach and not caring who saw her.

  Needy people made Lilly feel resentful. She had done her best to look out for Dash, whose physical health, weakened from alcoholism, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, lung cancer, depression, and imprisonment, made full-time care necessary. But he was not at all grateful and stoutly resisted her efforts until his death in 1961, which made her even more angry. Dottie, too, seemed like a burden, even though she asked for nothing. In the meantime, Lilly was flailing both personally and professionally. There was a terrific year in 1960 with Toys in the Attic, a meaty semiautobiographical work depicting her father’s family. The companion piece to The Little Foxes received laudatory reviews and ran more than a year. However, her next venture bombed. My Mother, My Father and Me, an adaptation of a satiric novel, opened during a newspaper strike in 1963 and closed after seventeen performances. Despite her formidable gifts as a playwright, strike or no strike, it was not very good. What she called a comedy failed to entertain the critics, with the New York Times suggesting it was a mirthless “hymn of hate.”95

  Another recent project, a Marlon Brando vehicle, had ended in personal mortification. The Chase, her first Hollywood assignment since being blacklisted, was an adaptation of a Horton Foote novel about brutality in a small Texas town. The job came at a painful time when she found herself consumed by the worst depression of her life, she recalled, a gush of bad feelings that had traveled with her since childhood. Director Arthur Penn, faced with a dysfunctional writer, ordered her script to be rewritten by Foote. An outstanding cast did not prevent mostly negative reviews labeling the film “in bad taste,” a jumble of violence, sensation, and clichés.96

  Of all her disappointments, the most painful was falling in love with a man she believed a possible successor to Hammett. Blair Clark was a journalist, television producer (CBS News), and political activist twelve years younger than herself. A Harvard graduate, he was a handsome, wealthy patrician whose well-born friends numbered politicians (John F. Kennedy) and poets (Robert Lowell). There is no question he was uncommonly affectionate, with their relationship so close that they were viewed as a couple; in fact, some mistook them for lovers. A romantic Valentine’s Day poem, in 1965, was titled “Lilly Pie, Baby” and began, “I love my Lillian.”97 Still, Clark was a divorced man who played the field and dated glamorous young women such as the newly widowed Jacqueline Kennedy. He
felt no sexual attraction for Lilly.

  The more he pushed her away, the greater her obsession; she wanted, not just sex, but matrimony. Clinging to her infatuation, Lilly deducted two years from her age, grieved over his rejection, and wrote heartachingly in her diary: “Blair – broken bad.”98

  •

  That winter of 1967, Wyatt Cooper brought over a tape recorder so that Dottie could reminisce about her life. For the love of God, she had the most horrible things happen in her childhood. It wasn’t exactly Little House on the Prairie. The Rothschilds weren’t normal – just a bunch of loudmouthed lunatics; and on her mother’s side, the Marstons were Yankee terrorists who manufactured firearms. The last thing she wanted was to go on about her life, but she didn’t want to disappoint Wyatt since she knew he was hoping to get a book contract out of it.

  A mere four years before, the Sharecropper was living down the street from her in Norma Place, in somebody or other’s garage apartment, aimlessly collecting unemployment. But the kid’s life contained more plot twists than a Saturday-morning cartoon: he moved to New York and promptly married glamour girl Gloria Vanderbilt; as a result, he was currently dwelling in baronial splendor among the fat cats. He and the Heiress – whom Dottie privately called Gloria the Vth – were living in a townhouse on East Sixty-seventh Street with their two-year-old son, and another child was due in June.

  Insisting that she was seventy-three and practically in her grave, she reluctantly agreed to the tapings because, looking on the bright side, his visits would perk up her day and maybe even “give me something to live for.” Sitting on her sofa, oblivious to the nervous yapping of her poodle, she lit up a Chesterfield as she waited for Wyatt to stop fiddling with the machine. “Let’s make it gay,” she told him. “If it’s not fun, there’s no point in telling it.” Then she got started: the Jersey Shore, Woodlawn in the Bronx, Long Island, her homes on the Upper West Side where she had lived her first twenty-seven years, not forgetting the Titanic and her family’s greatest tragedy.