The Last Days of Dorothy Parker

by Marion Meade

  Before she knew it, she had become an adult with a ridiculous life, not kind of ridiculous but ridiculous with nuts and raisins. Chained to a desk with pencil and pad was “the worst life I’ve ever heard of,” she wrote in a woeful moment. Typewriters were just as terrible because she always had a problem changing the ribbon. “This living, this living, this living / Was never a project of mine.” And yet, people went on saying, “Oh, so you’re a writer. Oh, that must be terribly interesting.”

  “Yeah, it’s a great life.”178

  And to make matters worse, so very short. For her thirty-fourth birthday she registered a brief complaint:

  Time doth flit.

  Oh, shit!179

  As life flew by, she often wished that “I was anybody but me.”180

  It’s hard to see around corners, however, and the name of Dorothy Parker, born Dorothy Rothschild in the last years of the Victorian era, burns bright in the twenty-first century.

  Parker’s writings, which have never been out of print, are available in bookstores and online, and her witticisms continue to be quoted, even those she did not originate because amateur and professional wisecrackers insist on ghosting bon mots on her behalf. Ordinarily, written humor comes with a shelf life. In contrast to beloved humorists of her generation – Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman – whose work prompts few chuckles anymore, her wit has held up amazingly well.

  No question, Parker is a charismatic literary figure – she is not like anybody else – and yet the true reason for her survival is neither wit nor wisecracks; it’s the work. The prose that seems so effortless is an example of the English language boiled down to essentials, divested of cliché and sentimentality. In these unadorned human stories, and in light verse, essays, and dramas, she beamed a light on her world. At the same time, however, she illuminates ours, which is why her work is still so readable a hundred years afterward.

  The earliest writers to document Parker’s life were Wyatt Cooper (1968) and Lillian Hellman (1969) as well as John Keats with his full-length biography, You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker (1970). Notwithstanding Hellman’s opposition, Keats managed to interview a few key people shortly after Parker’s death and deserves credit for a stouthearted basic attempt.

  In 1987, building on Keats’s work but lacking additional research, The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker was published by British biographer Leslie Frewin, whose previous subject had been Marlene Dietrich. The next year brought my biography, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (1988), which included scattered archival material, scores of interviews, and cooperation of the Rothschild family. Along with Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Edna Ferber, Parker is one of four women writers whose lives are described in Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties (Marion Meade, 2004). Kevin C. Fitzpatrick published a richly illustrated guidebook to the locations where Parker lived, many of the buildings still standing, in A Journey into Dorothy Parker’s New York (2005).

  The best picture of Parker’s life and writings remains her collected work, The Portable Dorothy Parker. A pocket-size book when first compiled by Viking Press in 1944, the collection has grown to a hefty 626 pages in its third edition, revised in 2006, with the addition of letters (1905–1962) and a self-portrait, published as an interview with the Paris Review (1956).

  In fiction, a shelf of mystery novels introduce a Dorothy Parker character as the sleuth: The Dorothy Parker Murder Case, George Baxt (1989); The Broadway Murders, first in a series of five Dorothy Parker Mysteries, Agata Stanford (2011–2012); and Murder Your Darlings, first in a series of three Algonquin Round Table Mysteries, J. J. Murphy (2011–2012). Unlike the mysteries, which all take place in the twenties, the most recent attempt to fictionalize Parker is set in the unlikely surroundings of present-day suburban Long Island. In Ellen Meister’s Farewell, Dorothy Parker (2013), the heroine is a movie critic who, after inadvertently channeling Parker, becomes dependent on her as an unpaid therapist.

  On the screen, Parker is the star of a feature film, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), and The Ten-Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table (1987), which won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. There has been no shortage of tributes, well-deserved and wacky: the U.S. Postal Service honored her with a 29-cent commemorative stamp; the Algonquin Hotel decorated a Dorothy Parker Suite; and memorabilia marketers stocked a dozen items including bumper stickers and trucker hats adorned with her quotes.

  In the end, her mismanaged arrival in the wrong state turned out rather well because New Jersey would designate her birthplace a National Literary Landmark. A bronze plaque stands at 732 Ocean Avenue, in the West End section of Long Branch, once the site of the Rothschild seaside cottage and now an apartment building.

  •

  Lillian Hellman is remembered as one of the most successful dramatists of the twentieth century. A giantess in the history of American theater, she wrote plays during the depths of the Great Depression that are regularly revived eighty years later. Both her jewel in the crown, The Little Foxes, and The Children’s Hour have become staples of regional and community theaters.

  But if Hellman’s position in the theater seems honorably ensured, the same cannot be said about her controversial personal life. She left behind a reputation that continues to be the subject of debate. Since her death in 1984, six major biographies have been published, altogether some one and a half million words put to paper trying to explain who Hellman was and why she behaved as she did. Despite severe censure, she still matters.

  While the operatic Hellman reveled in the spotlight, she recoiled from close examination of her private life by strangers and never fully came to terms with the fact that she was a public figure. Determined to thwart snoopers, she lamented in a 1973 interview that “in the end you can’t stop biographers.”181 This realization did not stop her from trying.

  One way to discourage busybodies is to leave behind as little as possible. Hellman could not bring herself to destroy much, as it turned out, because archivists at the University of Texas would toil over the processing of her papers (including a ton of banal ephemera) for years on end.

  Another method of controlling information is to appoint an official biographer, a literary watchdog, who will protect an image and, not incidentally, obstruct predators seeking to root through dark secrets. As her anointed biographer, she turned to her Little, Brown editor, William Abrahams, whom she considered a friend and would make one of her three literary executors. Although he is known to have interviewed Lilly’s attorney, Joseph Rauh, several times, his actual work is unclear because he died in 1998 before publishing the book. It seems possible that Abrahams never got around to writing a word.

  Stationing Abrahams as gatekeeper was pointless because writers brandishing book contracts scampered right past him. The first Hellman biographers, William Wright and Hilary Mills, had begun their investigations before Hellman’s death, which allowed her to embark on a letter-writing campaign asking friends to circle the wagons (and they hastened to obey). Wright, however, was a veteran who had published the lives of Luciano Pavarotti and Marjorie Merriweather Post, among other nonfiction works. Undeterred, he scrambled to round up some of his subject’s deadliest enemies: Diana Trilling and Mary McCarthy, along with Hellman’s former lover John Melby and attorney Joseph Rauh.

  Mills, too, conducted a number of important personal interviews, for example with another of Hellman’s lovers, Ralph Ingersoll, before deciding to quit. Choosing motherhood over biography, she subsequently sold some of her files (for $300) to another Hellman biographer, Carl Rollyson, who would eventually sell them (for $300) to a third biographer, Joan Mellen.

  Interestingly, Hilary Mills was married to a prominent Random House editor, Robert Loomis, who had edited all but one of the books of Hellman’s close friend William Styron. In addition, Hellman was particularly chummy with the s
ubject of Mills’s earlier biography of Norman Mailer and had granted an interview for the book. Apparently, these behind-the-scenes connections failed to reassure Hellman, whose guard was up.182

  Within two years of Hellman’s death, the first unauthorized books started to appear:

  Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman (1986) by William Wright is an ambitious attempt to sort out the truth and lies of a volatile life recently ended. Given the obstacles in his path, the result is critical but fair.

  Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (1988) by Carl Rollyson is the best all-round portrait based on evenhanded analysis and scrupulous research. It was Rollyson who found the smoking gun of Hellman’s Communist Party membership in the archives of her attorney. No excuses are made for Hellman’s actions.

  Wright and Rollyson were followed by four women biographers:

  Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett (1996) by Joan Mellen is a dual biography, basically more sympathetic to Hammett than to Hellman, which the author has described as “a critique of the Stalinist politics of Hellman and Hammett and their broader historical implications.”183 The only biographer personally acquainted with Hellman, she recalls in her introduction how she twice cooked for her (roast goose, crawfish bisque, fig cake). The highboy that Hellman left Blair Clark in her will now belongs to Mellen.

  Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (2005) by Deborah Martinson is a well-meaning effort to excuse Hellman’s bad behavior. Fan-girl reverence leads the biographer to paper over transparent fabrications, especially to rationalize the memoirs as innocent fictionalizations and to suggest that the story of Julia may be real.

  A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (2012) by Alice Kessler-Harris is an admiring historian’s attempt to rehabilitate a less-than-admirable subject in an unconventional biography that takes a different approach and observes her against the circumstances of her times. However, redemption via a series of essays on aspects of Hellman’s life sometimes means overlooking the lies, as well as appearing to give her an undeserved pass on charges of Stalinism.

  Lillian Hellman: An Imperious Life (Jewish Lives Series, 2014) by Dorothy Gallagher is unmistakably skeptical – at times, harsh – despite a genuine attempt at balance. Hellman impresses the author as remarkable but nonetheless “a piece of work,” with everything the term implies.184

  In some ways the most convincing – and most frightening – picture of Hellman is Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman (1988), a memoir by her principal heir and literary executor, Peter Feibleman.

  A novelization, Lillian & Dash by Sam Toperoff (2013), presumably aimed at readers unfamiliar with the real-life people, tries hard to transform them into lovable characters.

  Hellman’s life has been dramatized in film, television, and stage productions. In a one-woman show, Lillian (1986), she was played by Zoe Caldwell, and she is also the central character in Peter Feibleman’s play Cakewalk (1993), adapted from his memoir. Nick & Nora (1991), a Broadway musical based on The Thin Man, survived just nine performances. In addition to the film Julia, there was a sympathetic television film, Dash and Lilly (1999), directed by Kathy Bates and starring Sam Shepard and Judy Davis. Nora Ephron’s Imaginary Friends (2002), the story of Hellman’s feud with Mary McCarthy, shows the women reunited in hell and still slugging it out.

  With Hellman’s death, the McCarthy lawsuit came to an end. To this day, the dust has not settled, however. The name of Lillian Hellman is associated with the statement that “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” even though its significance is probably no longer readily identifiable by the younger generation. 185 But it is as likely as not that her name is synonymous with pathological lying and the now-famous Mary McCarthy remark that her every written word was a falsehood.

  To the general public, she may be the only major literary figure within memory whose posthumous reputation is defined as much by accusations of dishonesty as by her body of work. One of her biographers, Carl Rollyson, thinks that she “might be unique in the kind of damage she did to herself.”186 Working her way back into public esteem has been hampered by several complications. For one thing, Hellman never confessed wrongdoing and of course made no apologies. Then, too, her selling image was one of moral superiority, which made the misconduct all the more unforgivable. Surely the woman who flaunted her integrity, writing that “truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels,” could not be capable of deceiving her readers.187 Or could she? To many she is perceived as untrustworthy. And yet, tarnished reputations can be turned around, and the passage of years may ultimately blur her image as a fabulist. Or at least render it irrelevant. Time will tell.

  •

  Collectively, everybody who had a stake in protecting Parker’s reputation – an extended family of publishers, executors, relatives, and lawyers, as well as a host of devoted friends and admirers (some wondrously wealthy) – failed her. Whether out of carelessness, misunderstandings, spite, or whatever, nobody assumed responsibility for providing one of the essential rites of existence: a grave of one’s own.

  There is a temptation to judge Lillian Hellman a plainly bad friend or worse. Her obstructive behavior was no accident: she always acted in her own best interest, not Parker’s and not Hammett’s either. A controlling person, she expected to profit from Parker’s royalties though she had plenty of money of her own – and when her scheming was foiled, she punished Dottie. Looking back, the insensitive disposal of her friend’s personal belongings seems callous. But, more important, her refusal to cooperate with biographers succeeded in damping – even if only temporarily – critical attention to Parker’s work.

  But while some of Hellman’s actions appear to be indefensible, there may be a simple reason for them: after losing her influence over Parker’s estate, with her obligations at an end, she simply washed her hands of any further involvement and moved on. Who can really blame her? The dead, with perhaps the exception of immediate family, are more easily screened out than we like to imagine.

  The saga of Dottie and Lilly may be sad, but it’s almost comical too. Surely the first to smile about it would be Parker herself. She always imagined the hereafter as paradise, a sort of luxury hotel with hot and cold running dogs. Little did she guess that settling permanently would require a Homeric journey of twenty-one years. More galling, her real-life coda – afterlife in a tin can – doomed her to spend fifteen of those years hanging around Wall Street, the symbol of everything she hated, followed by eternal rest in Baltimore, another place not to her taste, a short distance from a parking lot (she didn’t drive). One of her oh-let’s-kill-ourselves verses (the aptly titled “Coda”) concludes with a courteous request: “Kindly direct me to hell.”188

  She should have been a lot more careful about what she asked for.189

  Appendix

  THE HUNT FOR DOROTHY PARKER’S WORLDLY GOODS

  Can the accumulations of a lifetime vanish? Over the years, I continued to keep an eye out in case anything should turn up. As it happened, two research collections that opened for use have made contributions to what is known about Dorothy Parker.

  At the University of Michigan, new material regarding Parker’s life in the 1930s and 1940s, during her marriage to Alan Campbell, became available in 1999. More than thirty years after Campbell’s death, his cousin Ann Gregory donated his papers in 1991 to the university’s Special Collections. This archive (1.25 linear feet) contains a batch of unpublished letters, one-sided and truncated, which Campbell wrote to Parker while he was stationed overseas during World War II, describing his wartime experiences. There are no replies to any of these letters. Neither does the archive include exchanges that might indicate problems in their marriage, which is disappointing because Campbell fell in love with an English woman. When the relationship did not work out, he ret
urned to America in November 1946; Parker divorced him in 1947. Presumably, the files were weeded at some point and correspondence relating to the split removed.

  The bulk of the archive is professional, mainly a dozen or so film scripts coauthored by the Campbells in the 1930s, especially notes and incomplete scripts for A Star Is Born, aka It Happened in Hollywood. The most interesting work by Parker without Campbell is the play script of The Coast of Illyria, written with Ross Evans, about the lives of Charles and Mary Lamb, which was staged in 1949 by the Margo Jones Theatre in Dallas. Included too are fragments of several stories (“Clothe the Naked,” “Cousin Larry,” “Glory in the Daytime”), most of them written during the years she knew Campbell. Financial documents include canceled checks and bank statements.

  The Michigan collection is valuable for its description of the couple’s professional lives as a Hollywood screenwriting team in the 1930s, along with details of Alan Campbell’s military service. In contrast to the Campbell papers, intentionally saved by his family, the University of Texas material consists primarily of sweepings, you could say, that had wound up on the cutting-room floor. Still, these odds and ends also add a minuscule amount of information to the last years of Parker’s life.

  At the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, archivists spent a decade cataloging Lillian Hellman’s papers, a hulking collection filling some 157 boxes (68 linear feet), which officially opened for use in 2005. Could some of Parker’s things be mixed in by accident? As it turned out, yes, because librarians processing the collection found various business and legal correspondence involving the settlement of Alan Campbell’s estate in 1963, along with a few royalty statements and permission requests. A single item relating to Parker’s work is the handwritten manuscript of “New York at 6:30 P.M.,” her description of John Koch’s paintings that was published in 1964. Apparently not in Parker’s possession at the time of her death, it was sent to Hellman by former Esquire editor Harold Hayes a decade later.