The Last Days of Dorothy Parker

by Marion Meade

  Trying to put on a good face, she took pains to tell the Times that she was “very impressed.”105 As far as she knew, Mrs. Parker was “the first white person who ever did this,” explaining that the gift was surely extraordinary but also completely in character. “She had very strong feelings about civil liberty and Negro rights.” Unfortunately, any deeper insights into the decision would be conjecture because “she never spoke of her will.” Left unspoken were her private feelings about the legatee.

  In the summer of 1963, she had been in Washington covering the civil rights march for the Ladies’ Home Journal. Her piece, “Sophronia’s Grandson Goes to Washington,” took an offbeat angle on the historic demonstration, however. Instead of a straightforward report, she penned a personal account that incorporated her Southern background and the family of her childhood nurse. The daylong program on the National Mall – long-winded speeches, music, rah-rah hoopla – eventually grew tiresome, and she began to wilt. It was, she decided, like a VIP funeral that goes on too long.

  Martin Luther King, kind man that he must be, nevertheless reminded her of grandiloquent Southern preachers from her youth. By the time he rose to begin his “I Have a Dream” speech, she felt thoroughly bored, she later admitted, and soon wandered away to find something to eat. She had heard it all before.

  If Dr. King in one of his finest moments failed to bowl her over, his position as new owner of Dottie’s estate impressed her less.

  To be sure, she and Dottie usually had quite different views on men. Alan had maddened her, obviously, and even though the relations between Dash and Dottie appeared cordial, Lilly claimed that he did not like her one bit. Once again, something similar was happening. The man to whom Dottie foolishly entrusted her future earnings – her legacy perhaps – was a person who failed to interest Lilly. This of course was Dottie’s decision, and there was nothing to be done about it. Still, she felt hurt and betrayed.

  Among her friends Lilly bristled with rage. To Howard Teichmann, in a thundering diatribe that the playwright later repeated to a biographer, she cursed her as “that goddamn bitch.”106 It was unbelievable because “I paid her hotel bill at the Volney for years, kept her in booze, paid for her suicide attempts – all on the promise that when she died she would leave me the rights to her writing. But what did she do? She left them directly to the NAACP. Damn her!”

  Lilly had paid for none of these things, of course, and Dottie certainly did not make the NAACP her heir.

  In her view, Dottie had made a promise and broken it. Maybe so. But what, exactly, was the agreement? True to her word, Dottie did in fact appoint Lilly as her executor. But it is one thing to be executor and another to inherit the estate. Whether she had additionally assured her of pocketing the rights as well is based entirely on Lilly’s say-so. In any case, Lilly did not take advantage of the provision allowing her to decline the position of executor in favor of Dottie’s alternate choice, the Los Angeles attorney Seymour Brick.

  Lilly’s wrath seemed directed less at the civil rights hero personally than at his organization, which she found timorous, ineffectual, and behind the times. Some years afterward, in a calmer mood, she was to say, “It’s one thing to have real feeling for black people, but to have the kind of blind sentimentality about the NAACP, a group so conservative that even many blacks now don’t have any respect for, is something else.” The only explanation, she liked to say, was that “Dottie must have been drunk when she did it.”107

  In the meantime, at his headquarters in Atlanta, Dr. King expressed surprise and gratitude. Of course he had never met Parker, and in all likelihood had never heard of her before, but he rose to the occasion. What impressed him, he said, was that “one of America’s most respected and warmly loved women of letters felt so committed to the civil rights movement that whatever she had she offered to it.”108

  •

  Along with control of Dottie’s work, Lilly would be obliged to deal with less appealing tasks that demanded immediate decisions. The Times had to be canceled, cartons of books taken away, payments issued to the Volney ($385.17) and Zitomer Pharmacy ($23.92), and on top of everything, the hotel wanted 6F vacated by the end of July. And who was supposed to remove Dottie’s personal belongings? Was that the concern of an executor?

  In this case it was.

  Opening drawers, she discovered several uncashed checks dating back to 1960, confirming her suspicions of Dottie’s financial ineptitude. In the bedroom closet hung all the clothing she owned, poor soul, none of it first-rate. The furniture belonged to the hotel; there were scarcely any kitchen utensils, not surprising given her disinterest in food. (Room service delivered her meals.) Lilly always knew that she had few possessions, but she was shocked to see how few. “Nobody ever left fewer accumulations,” she thought.109 She could not help thinking it pitiful. A classic pack rat herself, she needed multiple homes, both a city townhouse and a country residence, to store her copious things. But if she was a hoarder, she was also a sensible hoarder who believed in recycling. She routinely weeded out unused items for donation to the Irvington House Thrift Shop on Second Avenue.

  Finally, Lilly decided to send her secretary and cleaning man to the Volney. Together they cleared out 6F, dumping junk into the trash and bagging the rest, carting the plastic garbage bags back to Eighty-second Street. There were tons of papers, about God knows what, but it didn’t matter anymore. It made no sense to keep drek.

  The one thing she did salvage, however, was Dottie’s set of Napoleon’s generals, which wound up on a shelf in the living room.

  •

  Twelve years later, I would attempt to trace the contents of Apartment 6F. Contacting the NAACP lawyer who was handling the copyrights at that time, I began by inquiring about Mrs. Parker’s papers.

  Immediately Andrew Weinberger shook his head. “There are none,” he replied.

  This was unusual because writers normally leave correspondence.

  “No letters.”

  What about the material from her estate? All her belongings? First drafts, her typewriter, her books?

  “You won’t find a thing,” he cautioned. “Not a stick of furniture, not a chair or a stool, not a scrap of paper.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing.” 110

  I did not believe him. Was there any way on earth for a person to leave nothing? Besides, he did not understand my job, which was to dig and dig until, as often happened, something of importance turned up. Surely Andrew Weinberger had it wrong.

  Ten years passed. By the time my biography was published in 1988, quite a lot of interesting Parker material had come to light: poems written at age eleven for her father, photos of her twelfth birthday party, her nine-hundred-page FBI file, a Cartier watch handed down to her niece Lel, not to mention scores of her letters. I could say that I’d inspected Dottie’s Volney apartment, tramped through her Pennsylvania farmhouse, even spent a night in Alan Campbell’s childhood bed in Richmond. What I could not say was that I had located a single table or stool. Not one item that had been in Dottie’s possession at the time of her death, let alone anything that might be called a treasured doodad. Everything was gone.

  The scraps of their past that people leave behind at death – the birth certificates, Social Security cards, passports, wedding rings, address books, divorce decrees, bank books, the little trinkets squirreled away – all these artifacts had disappeared.

  Many years later, after Lilly’s death, her papers that had been deposited at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, became open to use without restrictions. I hoped that, perhaps finally, some Parker materials might surface. Research librarians tasked with cataloging the voluminous collection were able to find three manuscripts and a folder containing a few legal documents. Otherwise, there were “no caches of letters or other personal effects.” Hellman, in the words of one nonromantic archivist, “w
as a great one for donating to thrift shops” – the receipts saved for tax write-offs were among her papers – and so his educated guess was that Parker’s personal belongings went to a charity shop.111

  •

  The month after Dottie’s death, Lilly was at her house in Vineyard Haven, still trying to sort out Dottie’s things and looking to Oscar Bernstien for guidance. There were letters from Ferncliff about the remains, she told him; only she had “absolutely no knowledge” of what to do.112 Doubtless he responded, but his instructions were not followed, and so Dottie’s ashes waited in a limbo of sorts.

  Actually, no problem existed: Dottie owned her family’s plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx and therefore had every right to be buried there. In 1888, her father, J. Henry Rothschild, purchased Lot 6039 East, Myrtle Plot, designed to accommodate six grave spaces.113 Between 1888 and 1913, there would be four interments: himself, his wife Eliza, and her parents. Two spaces remained, but since Dottie’s three deceased siblings had chosen to be buried elsewhere, ownership went to Dottie by default. Several months earlier, while taping her childhood memories for Wyatt Cooper, she referred to Woodlawn Cemetery and went into macabre but comic detail about the Rothschild children visiting their mother’s grave. Her father, she explained, liked to present the trips as weekend excursions.

  Over the years the exact status of the plot, and her legal ownership, may have slipped her mind. And despite her attempts to amuse Wyatt, the subject was nothing to lose sleep over. Even so, a minimum of research, a single phone call to Woodlawn, by either her friends or the Campbell funeral home or Ferncliff, would have clarified the situation immediately.

  •

  Freeloaders got Lilly riled up, so when a Volney neighbor claimed she had been promised Dottie’s fur coat, Lilly swatted her aside with disdain. But Dottie’s niece and nephew in Brockport, New York, wondering if they might share the estate with Dr. King, provoked outrage. What “absolutely unmitigated gall,” she erupted to Bernstien. Not once had she heard Dottie mention these people. Besides, if they were that close to their aunt, they would know that she “owned almost nothing.”114 Rebuffed, the relatives requested an autographed book or a photo as personal mementos, but got no response. Neither did Lilly bother replying to queries about where their aunt was buried.

  In other cases, however, such as the piles of condolence notes from Dottie’s important friends, duty required personal replies. To one of these longtime friends, Lilly wrote of feeling guilty about her neglect of recent years because Dottie’s “disintegration” was too painful to witness.115 Parker was hardly reclusive, but Lilly blandly insisted that she shunned people out of embarrassment over “the way she looked.”

  In her capacity as literary executor, she could barely keep up with a swarm of business requests. Awaiting approval were two shows based on Parker material, now in various stages of development. A production featuring the music of Cole Porter and starring Julie Harris was scheduled for a Michigan tryout that fall prior to a Broadway opening. Equally exciting, Sandy Wilson was developing a proposal called “As Dorothy Parker Once Said.” Wilson was best known for his hit musical comedy The Boyfriend, which had introduced Julie Andrews in her first starring role, and months before Dottie’s death her enthusiastic Viking editor, Marshall Best, had talked up the project as potentially “quite big.”116 On a mundane level, Zero Mostel’s accountant brother Milton was busy calculating her assets. Early estimates put the value of the estate at roughly $10,000, not unreasonable for an elderly person living in reduced circumstances. But this figure turned out to be low. After deduction of debts and expenses, the amount would add up to $25,000, which is something close to $200,000 in today’s currency. At the same time, a search of her copyrights was under way, which ultimately would prove far more significant than the cash.

  Into Lilly’s lap fell every sort of question. Esquire, for example, wondered about an assignment Dottie had been working on, “The Middle-Aged Generation,” critical comments on contemporary novelists such as Norman Mailer, William Styron, and Gore Vidal. Had any drafts turned up in her apartment? The Library of Congress and Syracuse University were looking for Dottie’s papers. Would the estate be willing to donate them? (No, said Lilly.) But the greatest interest of all seemed to focus on her life. Not one but four publishers wished to commission a biography, and the suggested writers included Wyatt Cooper, William Zinsser, former Viking publisher George Oppenheimer, and Hellman herself.

  Lilly’s standard response was that Dottie had never wished to write her autobiography and never wished to be the subject of a biography. As executor, a “moral obligation” compelled her to state Dottie’s feelings on the matter.117 At the same time, she left herself a loophole, saying that she knew, as well as anyone, that she could not forbid such a book, and if the right person ever came along, she might even help. The operative word was “might.” To Lilly there was no right biographer: she despised all of them and had no intention of offering assistance. Biographers were skilled in snooping out the things people would just as soon keep to themselves. Worse, far worse, was the issue of control. Biographers took control of a subject’s life, something that horrified her.

  For a valid reason, Lilly rightly described Dottie as a reluctant memoirist: often enough she had been overheard saying that rather than write her story she would cut her throat with a dull knife. This had not prevented her, in times of need, from accepting advances with no plans to deliver a book, a practice that Random House cofounder Bennett Cerf found disgusting and unprincipled. But as she told one publisher when returning a portion of her advance, she had tried, “but it doesn’t come.”118 One reason it didn’t come was her speed. For a slow-paced writer who joked that she put down five words and erased seven, the completion of a full-length book on any subject was virtually impossible.

  For sure, Dottie’s unwillingness to do a tell-all book was not news. But privacy was not the reason. Just the opposite. As a confessional-style writer who had hemorrhaged intimate details of her life for fifty years, there was hardly a dark secret left to tell readers. What’s more, happy in the spotlight, she seldom refused an interview and even took pleasure in cooperating with Paris Review in a self-portrait for its “Writers at Work” series. (She didn’t hold back either, cheerfully drawing and quartering novelists like Edna Ferber.) Most recently, she had begun recording her youthful memories for the sake of a young man for whom she felt affection. It was no coincidence that, within weeks of her death, Wyatt Cooper pitched a mini-bio to Esquire, which would quote from the interview tapes but mainly recall his friendship with her and Alan when they lived on Norma Place. “Whatever You Think Dorothy Parker Was Like, She Wasn’t” was a heartwarming portrayal of Dottie in her declining years, first as half of a screenwriting couple trying to make a Hollywood comeback, then as a widow living with her poodle in a residence hotel, ironically a character out of her own play.

  There was nothing Lilly could object to, and besides, Wyatt was a Mississippi charmer. Even though his first-person reminiscences did not require her approval, his letters to Lilly were marked with the kind of gushy compliments that suggest a writer worried about keeping on the executor’s good side.

  In the midst of all that, Lilly was shocked to discover that Viking Press, Dottie’s publisher since 1930, had commissioned a biography behind her back. Instead of consulting her, Marshall Best “didn’t even tell me about it,” she fumed, in this instance legitimately upset because it was a slap in the face. When she chastised Best for “very bad manners,” the wily editor offered a flimsy excuse and argued that it was not an authorized book. She said that had nothing to do with it. He should have asked her opinion.119

  To make matters worse, the writer to whom Best had entrusted Dottie’s life story was downright preposterous, she believed. John Keats was a forty-seven-year-old journalist and author of works on social issues (Detroit automakers, suburbia, education, the food industry), along with a b
iography of Howard Hughes. His books, often best sellers, were known for zealous research and sharp wit.

  Lilly opposed Keats because he seemed ill-equipped to undertake the life of a clever woman like Parker, but he failed to win her approval in other aspects as well. As a person whose work was not endorsed by influential arbiters of literature, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, he was not a member of the club. In contrast to her select coterie of blueblood writers, the Mailers and Styrons and such, he was simply déclassé.

  Determined to stop him cold, she unleashed an all-out campaign employing rough-and-tumble tactics commonly used to thwart biographers. She rushed off notes to those Keats might be likely to approach – not only Dottie’s friends and professional colleagues but places she had lived and dined, such as managers of the Algonquin and Volney – and forbade them to talk. Dottie was against the book, so Lilly was not cooperating either. Mum was the word. Weirdly enough, her warning succeeded in silencing a great many people.

  Keats of course had a contractual obligation to Viking Press. Clearly worried about his hands being tied, he made an effort to resolve the problems by phoning Lilly and trying to win her trust. But it didn’t work; in fact, his audacity in placing the call simply fanned her anger, and before long the conversation grew intense. Losing his temper, he called her “a scorned women who puts her personal feelings ahead of her friend’s interests,” as she reported later to Marshall Best.120 Insulted, she felt further stung when he began analyzing her motives. Didn’t her hostility really indicate fear that he would start looking at her life, and perhaps Hammett’s as well, flushing out secrets that might cast doubt on their patriotism? The conversation turned hugely ugly when he brought up politics and specifically HUAC. He mentioned the Hollywood blacklist, and she, furious, exclaimed that the blacklist had never intimidated her. Although he stopped short of bringing up Communist Party membership and her support of Stalin, the line had already been crossed. His chances of getting her cooperation, let alone an interview, had gone to hell in a hand basket.