by Marion Meade
A former standup comic, Cavett was a small man with an engaging personality on-screen, irascible offscreen, whose success relied on persuading celebrities to engage in conversation on serious issues of the day. Unlike the late-night hosts on the networks, Cavett didn’t do jokes, magic tricks, or chitchat with plastic starlets. He went for intellectual guests – he loved writers – who would have something provocative to say, which to certain viewers like Hellman was the best kind of entertainment.
On the evening of January 25, 1980, Lilly was listening to Cavett interview Mary McCarthy, a writer Lilly had always disliked for her anti-Stalinist sentiments. Who, Cavett asked, were the most overrated contemporary writers? It was a variation on one of his stock questions, posed countless times to professionals in other fields, which made his program so much fun to watch.
McCarthy didn’t hesitate. Pearl Buck and John Steinbeck, she replied quickly, and in addition to those deceased writers she would add Lillian Hellman who, still alive, was unmistakably a has-been. To which she added that Hellman was “tremendously overrated, a bad writer, a dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past.”157 All that Joan of Arc preening before HUAC was ludicrous. As for Scoundrel Time, a self-congratulatory book that mangled history, it was nothing but warmed-over Stalinism and therefore more Hellmanology.
Lilly promptly pricked up her ears.
Cavett, who delighted in goading his guests, followed through with the obvious question immediately: What was dishonest about Lillian Hellman?
In a flash, McCarthy took a swing. “Everything,” she breezily declared. “I once said in an interview that every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” The woman was a virtuoso of deceit.
Cavett’s question was not as impromptu as it seemed because, apparently, McCarthy had known in advance that it would be asked.
In her bedroom, Lilly laughed out loud. The next morning, she called her attorney and told him to sue Mary McCarthy and the Dick Cavett Show.
Their decades-old acrimony involved two issues: professional rivalry and politics (because McCarthy had supported Leon Trotsky). Certainly Lilly had never made a secret of her scorn for McCarthy, aiming slurs at her whenever offered the opportunity. And sometimes she lobbed a sizable insult, as when, in an interview with the Paris Review, she called her “often brilliant” but unfortunately her fiction revealed her as an amateur, only “a lady writer, a lady magazine writer.”158 In fact, McCarthy was hardly a dabbler. Her novel about a set of Vassar graduates, The Group, spent two years on the best-seller list.
Practically everybody advised Lilly that suing McCarthy was a bad idea. Most likely she was seeking attention for her latest novel, Cannibals and Missionaries. But to Lilly, defiant as ever, it was outrageous that such ignominy could find its way into her bedroom through the television screen. McCarthy was a disgusting woman whose “poisonous nonsense” should not go unchallenged.159 Why shouldn’t she hold her feet to the fire?
Let it go, Peter Feibleman urged sternly. Move on with your life.
“What life?” she replied.160 She declined Cavett’s offer to rebut McCarthy. Did he really expect a response? What was she supposed to say – that she was not a liar? On February 15, Lilly filed a lawsuit for libel claiming $2.25 million in damages against McCarthy, Cavett, and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
Initially, Mary McCarthy’s reaction was to treat the lawsuit as a joke. It was a shame that Hellman couldn’t recognize hyperbole, she said. All she had done was to offer an opinion – after all, she was a literary critic. Once before, she had made the same comment in almost the same words, all but saying that when it came to dishonesty, Hellman was a career criminal. A year earlier, she had told the biweekly paper Paris Metro that she couldn’t stand Hellman. Her every word was false including “and” and “but.”
Whatever the case, McCarthy pointed out, Lillian Hellman had no grounds for her suit because she was a public figure.
For the rest of her life, Lilly continued to obsess over the case as it escalated into a tabloid catfight. Annoying Mary McCarthy became “faute de mieux” and a kind of enjoyable therapy rolled into one. Hopefully, the legal fees would ruin her. For her own counsel, Lilly chose Ephraim London, a prominent civil liberties lawyer and close friend who had taken the case gratis.
•
As the critic Diana Trilling had found out the hard way, you could risk losing your publisher if a book offended Lillian Hellman. Several years earlier, Little, Brown (also Lilly’s publisher) requested removal from her essay collection of several passages that Lilly found objectionable; when she refused, they canceled the contract, whereupon she took We Must March My Darlings to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in a brouhaha that reached the pages of the Times.
Hellman’s warlike swagger could be extremely intimidating. But not to everyone. For the Paris Review Martha Gellhorn drafted a sulfurous piece about lying and denounced Lilly as an “apocryphiar,” a word she coined to mean someone who fabricates a tale with herself as the heroine.161 The editor, George Plimpton, changed “Close Encounters of the Apocryphal Kind” to “Guerre de Plume,” but it didn’t matter what he titled it. Lots of people had come to fear Lilly, but Martha had been waiting years for a chance to scorch “that witch.”162 The result was a blistering article that made Mary McCarthy’s name-calling look like schoolyard hair-pulling.
The two of them had met for the first time in 1937, during the summer and fall when Martha and Hemingway, Dottie and Alan, and Lilly were in Paris and Spain, and also the very same weeks in which Lilly had set her “Julia” escapade. Gellhorn decided that almost every word in Lilly’s self-glorifying account of her visit to Madrid was a lie. On the offensive, she mauled Lilly for draping herself in the Spanish war like it was some Blackglama mink coat. No doubt, too, it must have grated her to find herself in An Unfinished Woman frivolously described as wearing “good boots,” a less-than-friendly barb similar to Lilly’s characterization of Mary McCarthy as a lady magazine writer.163
Gellhorn was quick to recognize Dottie’s importance in discrediting the story of “Julia.” Sensing that Hellman had already chucked any incriminating documents that pertained to the 1937 trip, she wrote that “Mrs. Parker might as well have left her papers to Fort Knox. Until Miss H. releases Mrs. Parker’s papers, there is no way to prove how long Miss H. stayed in Spain.” Likewise, there was no way to prove or disprove her train trip to Berlin with the currency in her hat. And for that matter, none of Lilly’s three memoirs would have been possible had Dottie – or Dash – been around.164
Martha Gellhorn’s venom provided a green light to critics who had once feared Lilly’s reprisals. The next writer to go after her was a former confidante, the journalist-novelist Renata Adler. In the early 1970s, Lilly had mentored the opinionated young woman whom she considered brilliant and hoped would be a friend for life. During her career at the Times and New Yorker, Adler simultaneously turned to fiction and in 1983 published her second autobiographical novel, Pitch Dark, based on her relationship with the civil rights lawyer Burke Marshall. In a memorable walk-on, drizzled with malice, Lilly appears as Viola Teagarden, described as a disagreeable woman who paraded around her anger as if it were some prizewinning thoroughbred bull, “to be used at stud,” and who brought a juicy lawsuit that had utterly no merit.165
Instead of confronting Adler, Lilly expressed her disdain to Marshall, telling him that Renata needn’t worry about a lawsuit from her. She regarded her hostility as inconsequential.
In fact, she faced more pressing matters because another ugly crisis had erupted. Only weeks earlier, Muriel Gardiner, who had done nothing about Pentimento for ten years, decided to publish a book about her life. In Code Name “Mary,” the psychoanalyst, eighty-two and soon to die of cancer, recounted how she had joined the anti-Fascist resistance while studying medicine and psychoanalysis at the University of Vienna, and how she had used the nam
e Mary to smuggle passports and money. Unlike Julia, Muriel had not lost a leg or been killed by the Nazis, but otherwise her resemblance to Lilly’s heroine was remarkable. As Gardiner pointed out, she and Lillian Hellman had never met, but there was a connection because they had shared a friend at one time.166
Caught in the cross-fire of Mary and Muriel, badgered for details about Julia and her wealthy family – by close friends like Blair Clark – Lilly had a hard time focusing and doled out conflicting tidbits that convinced nobody. Again, she brushed aside Gardiner’s story as foolishness, blustering that it was news to her because she had never heard of the woman until a few days earlier. “She may have been the model for somebody else’s Julia, but she was certainly not the model for my Julia.’’167 Don’t bother her; she was tired of the subject.
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As her health problems worsened, Lilly lived in a state of volcanic rage: she barked orders at domestic help and cursed her devoted secretary Rita Wade as “a dirty Catholic son of a bitch.”168 As she departed Massachusetts General Hospital in 1983, where she had slapped nurses and thrown trays of food, the staff she had tyrannized for four months was heard to shout cheers of joy. Her hair-trigger outbursts, increasingly repulsive, alienated even the most sympathetic of friends. She was, reported William Styron, “utterly insane and loathsome to everyone, but is mercifully immobilized by her cigarette, her blindness, feebleness and venom and so can really bite no one seriously.”169 Her wild, bold side, so admired by friends and feared by others, had turned grotesque.
The final year of her life consisted largely of trying to deny her real circumstances: blindness, strokes, hallucinations, paralysis, and attacks of uncontrollable rage. For a distraction, she began collaborating on a cookbook with Peter Feibleman. Eating Together had to be dictated since she could no longer read or write. Many of the recipes are too old-fashioned for broad appeal, but she did a roast chicken and scrambled eggs to perfection. Strangely, some of the recipes brought back memories of Dottie, one of her few friends who had no interest in cooking. She recalled them driving to the Vineyard on a St. Patrick’s Day and Dottie fulminating against the Irish with insults that were “amazing in variety and sometimes in length.”170 The more Lilly laughed, “the more remarkable grew her anger with the Irish. By the time we got to the traffic on Major Deegan Parkway, they were even responsible for Hitler’s Holocaust.” After the six-hour drive, she cooked “a very good meal” of crispy roast duck and warm green beans vinaigrette.
Lilly died on June 30, 1984, ten days after her seventy-ninth birthday. Several months earlier, Peter Feibleman had visited her in New York. A nurse who stopped him to announce the approaching end warned that Hellman could no longer eat, sleep, or walk, and her memory was failing. Making his way into Lilly’s room, he asked how she felt.
Wretched, she answered in irritation. “This is the worst case of writer’s block I ever had in my life.”171
Up on Martha’s Vineyard, following a bon voyage luncheon hosted by Rose Styron, Lilly was buried in Chilmark Cemetery. After eulogies by old friends like Patricia Neal and Jules Feiffer, after references to her as “a finished woman” by John Hersey, after Bill Styron told the mourners that he was the last person to take her out to dinner, people went back to her house in Vineyard Haven for another good-bye and more food.172 Eating together seemed appropriate.
All the while, down in Wall Street, the can containing Dottie’s ashes was still stranded in Paul O’Dwyer’s makeshift mausoleum. By this time, it was forgotten by everyone but O’Dwyer.
•
Three years after Hellman’s death, I was preparing to deliver my biography of Dorothy Parker. Chatting on the phone one afternoon with Paul O’Dwyer, who was at his desk in his Wall Street office, I mentioned my plans to visit Parker’s grave. Whenever possible, I made a point of checking out the whereabouts of a deceased subject, if for no other reason than to pay respects. After eight years, one final task remained: a trip to Ferncliff Cemetery.
“Oh, she’s not there,” O’Dwyer said.
“Of course she is.” If there was one thing I knew for sure, it was where Dottie was buried.
“No, no. I’m looking right at her.” He had her in his office, he said, and then proceeded to explain how the unclaimed ashes had ended up in his care.
“Excuse me? Never buried?”
The truth was, he said, Mrs. Parker had been occupying his file cabinet for almost fourteen years.173
In his cabinet? Among the file folders? Good grief, hadn’t he thought of a more suitable spot, say a shelf? I put down the phone and immediately began looking for a solution. My initial thought was to wonder if I might claim the ashes and arrange for a proper burial. Very likely a biographer taking possession of a subject’s remains was unconventional, but these were unusual circumstances.
In any case, O’Dwyer had other ideas. Once the cat was out of the bag, he understood that something needed to be done. After New York Daily News columnist Liz Smith wrote about the ashes, suggestions flowed in from all over the country. Ideas ranged from the traditional to the creepy: sprinkling the ashes from an airplane, commission of an oil painting, enshrinement in one of the Algonquin’s bars.
Throughout that year, O’Dwyer began discussions with the NAACP, and soon the matter was quietly resolved. It was a thoughtful decision, which, unlike some of the proposals that leaned heavily on her reputation as a drinker, would finally give her remains the respect they deserved.
On the evening of March 16, 1988, the lobby of the Algonquin was the scene of a boisterous party and press conference, swarming with Parker aficionados, newspaper reporters and TV cameras, curious hotel guests, and a sprinkling of gate-crashers hoping to cadge free wine. After all, ashes parties did not happen every day. Among the revelers was Liz Smith, who was asked to imagine what Mrs. Parker might say about the gathering. “She would have thought it was absolutely ridiculous, and, even if she loved it, she would have made fun of it.”174 Finally, the white haired, eighty-year-old O’Dwyer made his big announcement: coming to Mrs. Parker’s rescue, he said, was her executor, the NAACP, who wished to give the ashes a home at its national headquarters. No planes or hotel bars for Dottie. She was going to Baltimore.
The assembled guests stared blankly. Their Mrs. Parker in Baltimore? She would rather stick a pencil in her eye.
Quickly O’Dwyer went on to introduce a graying, heavyset man, Dr. Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP, who had come up from Baltimore for the occasion. Sensible as the plan sounded, some of those present looked disappointed while others began whispering unhappily. Hooks hurried to say that he understood some might object to the NAACP getting the ashes, “not because we’re not worthy but because we’re not in New York.”175 This was true. Somehow the idea of Parker, a chauvinistic New Yorker, hustled off to eternity in Baltimore seemed strange.
But then came a second surprise: his organization was not content to claim Parker’s ashes, but instead they planned to put up a memorial on its grounds. To many of the sophisticates milling around the Algonquin lobby, Dorothy Parker’s connection to the NAACP had come as a complete surprise.
That very evening, Hooks personally bore the can to Baltimore. As he would observe afterward, “The idea of a white woman leaving her entire estate to the black cause was unparalleled. I can imagine the gesture was greeted with a raised eyebrow by many whites.”176
Although Dottie the nonbeliever wanted no funeral, she would get two of them, unusual for a nonpracticing half-Jew, half Episcopalian. Seven months later, on a gusty day in late October, Benjamin Hooks and the mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke, would bury Dottie at the NAACP national headquarters on Mount Hope Drive. As befitted a major literary figure, the ceremony dedicating the Dorothy Parker Memorial Garden was a solemn affair with speeches emphasizing her commitment to civil rights and to the traditional ties of friendship between blacks and Jews.
The vice president of the Baltimore Board of Rabbis was on hand to toss in a symbolic handful of dirt, followed by tributes to her work by a local university professor, a remembrance by Paul O’Dwyer, and three musical interludes. Missing were references to the bad old days, her dedication to the Communist Party and other unpopular activities that had led to the necessity of claiming a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
None of her friends were able to attend because nearly all of them were gone: Lillian Hellman, Sid and Laura Perelman, Beatrice Stewart, Sara Murphy, Zero Mostel. Even young Wyatt Cooper had died of a heart ailment at age fifty.
No expense had been spared in constructing the $10,000 memorial, a brick circle in a grove of nine towering white pines, designed by the dean of the Howard University School of Architecture. The inscription on the forty-pound bronze urn read:
Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) Humorist, writer, critic, defender of human and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested “Excuse My Dust”. This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind, and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people. October 20, 1988.
At long last, Dottie was laid to rest twenty-one years, seven months, and thirteen days after her death.
Epitaph
LAUGHTER AND HOPE AND A SOCK IN THE EYE177
One thing about life, the road can go awry so easily. For a start, Dorothy Parker got cheated out of being a New Yorker. She was supposed to be one, but somebody goofed and she wound up arriving the wrong month (August), in the wrong place (by the sea some sixty miles south of New York). The family trekked back to the city immediately after Labor Day, but somehow it didn’t count.