by Marion Meade
It was stuff she had not spoken about, or even thought of, for more than half a century. Mother died and Papa was not right in the head afterward. On Sundays he dragged the entire family to Woodlawn so that they could talk to Eliza. Papa decided to marry a crazy bitch from the neighborhood who conversed with Jesus. None of the children were nice to Eleanor so that she had a stroke one morning and died. Soon after came Rags and Nogi, and for a while, stupidly victorious, they had the dogs to make life worth living. There was the spring all those years ago when Papa’s brother, poor Martin, died on the Titanic. Papa was wall to wall batty after that. And then he died. Naturally, it wrecked her but then she got the job playing piano at the dance studio.
The craziest things came floating back, such as the day when her brother passed her on the street and pretended not to know her. Even though both her brothers and her sister had died, nothing much had changed since 1907. She still saw herself as “just a little Jewish girl trying to be cute.”
After a couple of weeks she had to stop the sessions, disappointing Wyatt. She had tried very hard to continue, but it was no use; because, quite frankly, despite her best efforts she was straining for self-deprecating things to say. What she had most enjoyed about the tapings were the hours spent with her friend.99
Wyatt was Gloria Vanderbilt’s fourth husband (her third, Leopold Stokowski, was fifty-eight years her senior), and everybody, Dottie included, found the new marriage baffling. Truman Capote considered her choice of Wyatt “a mystery. He certainly wasn’t like anybody’s father.”100 Wyatt let slip to Truman that during sex the Heiress “would scream over and over, Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” (which Capote leaked to his biographer), an enticing detail that would have lent itself, had Dottie known about it, to extensive clinical analysis.
Because the tapings had to be put aside, the Coopers decided to host a dinner party in her honor and made sure a great deal of care went into the guest list. By and by, acceptances arrived from an impressive roster of notable New Yorkers, among them several power couples – the Bennett Cerfs, the Bill Paleys, and the Martin Gabels (Dorothy Kilgallen). Dottie, excited, was also secretly irritated to learn that none of her friends would be there. The Coopers claimed that wasn’t the point – the purpose was to invite interesting people she didn’t know, ones she’d like to meet. Still, the way she saw it, her friends were not sufficiently chichi. Manufacturing an excuse to call the whole damn thing off, she said that she couldn’t come because she had nothing to wear, which was actually the case. This posed no problem to the Heiress who sent her a yellow brocade dress trimmed with seed pearls, which was size 3 but still much too large and almost reached the floor. The gift necessitated a trip to Saks to purchase sparkly slippers and handbag, whose cost made a serious dent in her budget.
However much Dottie appreciated the Coopers’ thoughtfulness, however great her affection for the Sharecropper, she nonetheless felt out of place among all those starchy, piss-elegant rich people. In the Cooper townhouse, a long dining table had been gaily set with a red tablecloth and vases filled with elaborate flower arrangements. No detail was overlooked by Dottie, who afterward described the party to her uninvited friends. Cutting straight to the heart of the matter, she offered an expert appraisal of the expensive wine goblets. Leave it to the Heiress to do things right, she said, because there wasn’t a paper cup in sight.
•
For all her yelping about the exclusion of her people from the Coopers’ guest list, it was not really important. As a person whose roots in the city went back to another century, she had a sizable social circle and routinely saw Sid and Laura Perelman, Kate and Zero Mostel, Jack and Madeline Gilford, Heywood Hale “Woodie” Broun, actresses like June Walker, writers like Quentin Reynolds, and playwright Ruth Goetz, whose father had staged Dottie’s first play, Close Harmony, in 1924. Living in Dottie’s building with a nurse-companion was her dear friend Sara Murphy, a Volney resident since her husband, Gerald, had died two years earlier.
The person she rarely saw was Lilly. What was to be their last visit took place in March 1967, right before Lilly trooped off to the Soviet Union. There was a postcard, mailed during a stopover in Paris, in which she nostalgically referred to their long-ago visit (that would be 1937) to the city and promised to phone when she got back. In Peter Feibleman’s memoir of Hellman, he writes that the two never saw each other again after Dottie returned to New York, but the details of the Paris postcard prove otherwise. It is one of two such pieces of correspondence in Hellman’s papers; the other is an undated telegram from Lilly in Vineyard Haven to Dottie in Hollywood, wishing her a happy birthday.
Dottie’s most devoted friend was Beatrice Stewart, a onetime Santa Barbara debutante who used to be married to Dottie’s writer pal Donald Ogden Stewart in the twenties, back when Dottie was still married to Eddie Parker. They knew each other well enough, after forty years, to put up with pretty much everything. Bea had two sons with Stewart before their divorce (in 1937), then became the third wife of Leo Tolstoy’s grandson, a U.S. citizen who had built Marineland in Florida. The marriage did not last.
In The Ladies of the Corridor and the short story “I Live on Your Visits” appear pathologically needy mothers who smother their sons, thinly disguised portraits of Bea (embellished with a pinch of Alan’s exasperating mother, Hortense). Bea, however, had refused to connect the dots, either unable to recognize herself or perhaps had simply decided to forgive Dottie. Those works were written a dozen years ago. Now it was 1967 and both of them were alone, husbands dead or alive or lost to Karl Marx, living with their poodles, doing their best.
Every few days or so, Dottie trudged the eight blocks to Bea’s apartment on East Eightieth Street, where they would have dinner together. Pecking at the food and smoking, she could spend an entire evening expounding on the endless indignities of her life. When it was time to leave, she would open her purse and say, “What am I going to do about taxis?”101 A person like herself did not accept handouts, so when Bea offered a dollar or two, Dottie always said she really shouldn’t take it. Then she always did.
She had been raised to never speak of money, but her situation by this time had grown worrisome. Royalties and permissions were steady but modest, and options for dramatizations occasional and unprofitable. There was no money for luxuries like party gowns and cabs, despite rigorous scrimping. For that matter, after buying staples – mostly, Scotch and Chesterfields – she had little left over.
Unfortunately, taxis had become a necessity. Unsteady on her feet after several bad spills, she took special care about walking on the street in the dark. Nobody knew that her eyesight had gotten much worse. She continued to have the Times delivered, but reading it was a struggle.
Bea scolded her. “What the devil have you done with your glasses?”
Useless, she told her. “I can’t see anyway.”
•
Late Wednesday afternoon, June 7, 1967, a Volney desk clerk phoned Bea Stewart. “She’s gone,” he announced.
Gone? Bea had dinner with Dottie just the other day, but there was no mention of going anywhere.
No, no, said the clerk. A chambermaid found Mrs. Parker in her bedroom. She was dead.
This kind of news, not normal but not all that rare in a hotel with numerous elderly occupants, was presumably broken in a professional manner. Bea, composed, replied that something had to be done about Dottie’s poodle. A dog owner herself, she told the clerk to remove Troy from the apartment. She would hurry right over to pick him up.
When Bea got to the Volney, 6F was an apartment in transition, perfectly calm just hours earlier and suddenly a hive of activity. Lying in the bedroom was Dottie, who, as accurately described by the desk clerk, had gone. In the living room, police officers and firefighters busied themselves filling out forms and asking questions about next of kin. Hotel employees pushed in and out while curious neighbors gathered in the corridor.
For a while Bea lingered. Nobody was guarding the door. In the apartment were books and knickknacks, a closet of clothing, Dottie’s desk and typewriter, everything that remained of the house in Norma Place. What was to prevent vandals from pilfering whatever they fancied? Not that valuables were in view, but there was no accounting for souvenir hunters. They were not the sort of people likely to show much respect.
Finally, there was nothing to wait for, and so Bea took the dog and slipped into the hum of evening traffic on Madison Avenue.102
Chapter 6
FERNCLIFF
(1967)
For her half a century as a writer, Dottie was rewarded with the equivalent of a gold watch: a front-page obituary in the New York Times.
DOROTHY PARKER, 73, LITERARY WIT, DIES
The New York Times, Thursday, June 8, 1967, Page 1
By Alden Whitman
Dorothy Parker, the sardonic humorist who purveyed her wit in conversation, short stories, verse and criticism, died of a heart attack yesterday afternoon in her suite at the Volney Hotel, 23 East 74th Street. She was 73 years old and had been in frail health in recent years.
The prominence of the obituary startled some. There were those who found it remarkable because they had thought she was already dead, while others, including a few of her dearest friends, were secretly jealous. Did she really deserve such an honor? After all, she owed her reputation to work first written in the twenties. Had she not been resting pretty much on her laurels lately?
But after the backbiting and the whispers died down, everyone donned their sympathy faces and turned up at Frank E. Campbell’s funeral home. In her will, Dottie had stipulated no funeral service, formal or informal. Reading between the lines allowed for no prayers, blessings, or eulogies, no jibber jabber of any kind. Her scenario, simple as it was efficient, amounted to a suitable farewell for a devout atheist.
Within hours of her passing, however, Lilly lost no time arranging a funeral, small but nice, including the selection of the Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper party outfit as a shroud. Of course there were other friends who might have volunteered – Bea Stewart for one – but once Lilly had accepted responsibility and began issuing orders, the rest backed away. Obviously, as the presumed executor, it was her right, if not her responsibility.
Dashiell Hammett, who had looked upon rituals of any kind with horror, insisted that he did not want a funeral, traditional or otherwise. When he died six years earlier, Lilly dressed him in a tuxedo, delivered a heartfelt eulogy, and buried him in Arlington National Cemetery. Dash just didn’t know he wanted a funeral. Likewise, Dottie’s wishes were of no consequence either. The decisions fell to Lilly who began making phone calls, notified Campbell’s, and saw that the ceremony would be covered by local papers. Decisive as usual, she handled the funeral without emotion.
•
In the days when Dottie first lived at the Volney, in the early fifties, the sight of what seemed like five hundred old ladies under one roof had moved her to a grim thought. What if she died in this Madame Tussauds? The passenger elevator was too narrow to accommodate a gurney, and the service elevator was used to collect trash. The hotel, she told Quentin Reynolds, a journalist also living there, really ought to construct a chute between one of its upper floors and Campbell’s, several blocks away. It was the ideal solution. “We’d arrive in good condition and the trip would take a minute.”103 Prophetically, she did indeed die at the Volney, and her body did indeed go to Campbell’s. Not by chute of course.
On a very hot Friday, Dottie’s friends gathered one last time. Anticipating a modest turnout, Lilly had bypassed the main chapel and scheduled the service for a small private room that seated around eighty. The event brought out an impressive showing of literary and theater lions – Arnold Gingrich of Esquire, Dorothy Schiff of the Post, Thomas Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer of Viking, writers Arthur Kober and Charles Jackson, S. J. Perelman, actors Zero Mostel, Maureen Stapleton, and Jack Gilford – joined by dozens of fans and gawkers. While Wyatt Cooper showed up, Gloria was preoccupied with the arrival of their second son, Anderson Hays, born the previous weekend. The small flower-filled chapel was soon jammed, and half the nearly 150 mourners had to stand in the hall and crane their necks.
Initially, a violinist played Bach’s “Air on a G String,” and then Lilly stood up and read a twenty-minute remembrance praising her friend as “a great lady.” In a solemn voice, she said that “she was part of nothing and nobody but herself. It was this independence of mind and spirit that was her true distinction.” Twice referring to Dottie’s final years, she mentioned her being “brave in deprivation, in the chivying she took during the McCarthy days, to the isolation of the last, bad, sick years.” She tried relating a joke, saying that Dottie had wanted this epitaph on her tombstone: “If you can read this, you’ve come too close.”
Next, Zero Mostel stepped forward. The barrel-chested comic actor, blacklisted in the fifties, recipient of a Tony Award for Fiddler on the Roof in the sixties, was not going to pretend when the service was a farce. “It was Dorothy’s express wish that there be no formal ceremonies at all,” he said. Having summed up the situation economically, he repeated the remark she had made to him after signing her will, that all she had to do then was kick the bucket. “If she had had her way, I suspect she would not be here at all.”
Zero sat down. Another rendition of “Air on a G String” closed the service, which had clocked in at thirty-five minutes.
On the sidewalk, the mourners seemed in no rush to leave. Without any particular evidence of moistened eyes, they treated the funeral as a social occasion, clustered around wisecracking as they conducted a postmortem in the heat. Almost as if Dottie were leaning down from a cloud, they riffed about whether she would have liked it. Nobody thought so.
To Sid Perelman, the program went on far too long. He was sure Dottie’s foot would have been tapping because “she had a very short fuse.” Naturally, Lil’s attempt to reproduce her wit fell flat. Her best lines, he said, could not be repeated in any eulogy because they were obscene.
There was no shortage of hilarity over Lilly’s chutzpah, how she capped her disgraceful neglect of recent years with a soiree Dottie didn’t want. Worse, her stage-managing of the funeral, a paint-by-the-numbers affair, was especially inappropriate. Bea Stewart thought that Dottie would have “HOWLED at the way Lillian Hellman decided to run the show.” She would’ve died on the spot had she been forced to watch. It was goofy sidewalk shtick that would not have amused Lilly.
Eventually, everybody went home.104
On their way back to their farm in Bucks County, Sid and Laura Perelman were not likely thinking about Dottie’s remains; neither was this a concern of the new father Wyatt Cooper or any other mourner. Everybody assumed that Lilly would take care of the remaining details.
•
Ferncliff Cemetery is situated along a silent country road in the village of Hartsdale, New York, a twenty-five-mile drive north of Manhattan. Established in the early days of the twentieth century, Ferncliff is not a traditional burial place. There are no upright headstones in its seventy-acre park, only markers flush with the ground. Equally distinctive is its mausoleum, a climate-controlled, museumlike palace of gorgeous stained-glass windows and Oriental rugs, whose marble corridors resonate with the sounds of soothing nondenominational hymns; here are entombed the likes of Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Paul Robeson, and Moss Hart. That weekend of June 10, the cardboard container with Dottie’s body arrived at Ferncliff.
In 1967, it was a popular destination for deceased New Yorkers desiring cremation because it was – and still is – the only crematory in Westchester County. One luminary who would be cremated there, thirteen years later, was John Lennon, whose ashes were claimed by Yoko Ono. For the lesser-known, next of kin could remove their loved one’s ashes or arrange interment in the Ferncliff mausoleum or its special cremation garden.
•
Despite the cracks from Dottie’s gang of borscht-belt wiseguys, Lilly, out of the goodness of her heart, had made sure she got a funeral she deserved. Her eulogy had characterized Dottie as a person who “never spoke of old glories, never repeated old defeats, never rested on times long gone.” To remember her was to step back in time and think of the two of them together, the late nights when Dottie would be sipping watered Scotch and then peel off her ladylike manners and let loose with jokes that made Lilly shriek with laughter.
Suffice it to say, the spoilsports at Campbell’s had allowed her to assume the burden of Dottie’s exit without bothering to lift a finger. Unknown to those clowns, she had been walking around in a daze ever since reading the will. Nothing had prepared her for the contents.
For a very long time, she had expected to be named literary executor, and she also assumed she would be Dottie’s sole heir, the person who would receive the copyrights, royalties, and contract rights, all the cash and negotiable securities, plus the proceeds of a trust fund. To her astonishment, she learned that even though the executorship remained hers, the estate would go to Martin Luther King Jr. and someday to the NAACP.