Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (12 page)

Still a virgin in his early twenties, a repressed, bewildered, presumably homosexual male who adored dressing in women’s clothing and fantasized becoming a mother, he must have been terrified at the thought of sex with either gender. When he developed mumps at twenty-two and his physician warned that the illness in adult men might affect potency, Woollcott apparently decided to use this as a convenient means of resolving the troubling issue of his sexuality. Thereafter he played the role of a “semi-eunuch” who was physically incapable of consummating the sex act. As a substitute for sex, he indulged himself by wearing scarlet-lined opera capes, insulting friends with greetings like “Hello, repulsive,” and eating enormously and exquisitely until his weight swung up to a blimpish 255 pounds.

Since Woollcott enlisted as a medical orderly as soon as war was declared, Dorothy had never encountered her colleague from the Times on opening nights. The hosts of the welcome-home luncheon, John Peter Toohey and Murdock Pemberton, sent her an invitation simply because she was
Vanity Fair’
s critic. They apparently did not think to invite Benchley and Sherwood. Dorothy, who went nowhere without them, insisted they accompany her to the Algonquin, where a long table had been decorated with American flags and a green felt banner that intentionally misspelled Woollcott’s last name.

Some thirty-five guests showed up, nearly all of them theatrical reporters, critics, and columnists from the daily papers, just the sort of people whom press agents might be expected to court. The most important journalist at the table was Franklin Pierce Adams, a mythical figure to Dorothy, who never missed reading The Conning Tower. Not only did he publish the type of verse she was laboring to write, but several times a week he ran a parody of
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
, recounting in mock Elizabethan English his flirtations, his frailties, the opening nights he attended, the books he read, and the celebrities he habitually met. To be mentioned in F.P.A.’s column was a distinction of the highest order.

Adams was a personal friend of Woollcott’s. In Paris they had served together on the staff of the American Expeditionary Force’s weekly newspaper,
Stars and Stripes
, as had another of the guests, former Private Harold Ross, the paper’s managing editor. Ross had developed a love-hate relationship with Woollcott, whom he thought of as “a fat duchess with the emotions of a fish.” On their first meeting, Ross viewed Sergeant Woollcott with suspicion when he had come strutting into the
Stars and Stripes
office.

“Where’d you work before?” Ross asked.

“The New York Times,”
Woollcott pronounced in his most pompous voice. “Dramatic critic.”

Ross broke into raucous laughter. No real man would work at a sissy profession like drama critic.

“You know,” Woollcott said to him, “you remind me a great deal of my grandfather’s coachman.”

To this Ross would never be able to think of a suitable retort because there was none—he would always look as if he had tumbled off the train from Sauk Center. None of the
Stars and Stripes
writers would have won beauty prizes. F.P.A.’s beak nose and long, scraggly neck once led Irvin Cobb, seeing a stuffed moosehead, to exclaim, “My God, they’ve shot Frank Adams.” Harold Ross’s looks were pitiful. His hands, feet, ears, and mouth were too big, his gray eyes too small, a thicket of stiffish, mouse-colored bristles shot out of his scalp, and a large gap separated his two upper front teeth. When Ross once asked Woollcott for dental floss, Woollcott called out, “Never mind the floss, get him a hawser.”

A westerner from Colorado, a miner’s son who had dropped out of school at fourteen, Ross had bummed around the country working on a dozen newspapers before he enlisted. He had planned to return to the West Coast, charter a boat, and, like Jack London, take a restorative cruise to the South Seas, a project at once exotic and worthy of a real man. Definitely not among his plans was living in New York, which he considered a terrible place. While in Paris, Woollcott had introduced him to Jane Grant, a
New York Times
society reporter who had come over with the YMCA, and Ross had fallen in love. Now he lived in the Village and edited a new weekly magazine,
The Home Sector
, which was a stateside version of Stars and Stripes for veterans, and Jane Grant was back at the
Times
with a promotion to hotel news editor. They were engaged.

Another couple at Woollcott’s luncheon had already married and spent their honeymoon in France as war correspondents: Heywood Broun and Ruth Hale. Dorothy had met Broun one summer long ago at the shore. He was a distant memory of heat and sand, a Horace Mann student who was an acquaintance of her sister. She was pleased to see Broun and liked his wife, supposing them to be a modern couple successfully negotiating the shoals of marriage by having produced a child and still pursuing their separate interests.

Frank Adams, best man at their wedding, had called them “the clinging oak and the sturdy vine,” for Ruth was a militant feminist who had balked at the word obey in the Episcopal marriage service and threatened to call the wedding off. Tight-lipped when anyone addressed her as Mrs. Broun, she declared that she was not and never would be anyone but Ruth Hale. Her husband, a thirty-one-year-old
Tribune
columnist, was a large, anxious, slovenly man, who bore a physical resemblance to a laundry bag. His sense of fashion was certainly odd. In Paris, learning of General John Pershing’s decree that all war correspondents must wear uniforms, Broun outfitted himself at the Galeries Lafayette department store in what he believed to be appropriate attire: pink riding breeches, fedora, and raccoon coat. Pershing, noticing him at an inspection, disheveled and unlaundered with his puttees sagging about his ankles, stared in bewilderment before asking, “What happened? Did you fall down?” How Broun managed to survive a war is unclear. His phobias included trains, automobiles, and elevators. He was also a hypochondriac who took his own pulse to make sure he was still alive.

At the Algonquin, Dorothy remained silent, shyly blinking at everyone from under the brim of her Merry Widow hat, virginal, self-conscious, and extremely well turned out in one of her good suits so that she looked like a Park Avenue princess slumming. She could not decide whether or not she even liked Woollcott and his friends. A few months earlier she had written a scathing article about men whose war service had taken place far behind the front lines, scorning them as “the numerous heroes who nobly accepted commissions in those branches of the service where the fountain pen is mightier than the sword.” Finding herself in the company of “fountain-pen lancers” made her feel so uncomfortable that she usually clammed up and concealed “the fact that my husband went to the front—it made him seem like such a slacker.” Nobody at Woollcott’s party knew the article was hers because she had used a pseudonym, but nevertheless she felt biased against them.

In years to come efforts were made to resurrect what, if anything, of significance had taken place that day, who had said what and to whom, but by then nobody remembered much. The only certainty was that Aleck Woollcott had held center stage recounting his wartime adventures at length and that the others were good-natured about allowing him to spout off. All his stories began with “When I was in the theater of war...” and finally Arthur Samuels cut him short. “Aleck, if you ever were in the theater of war, it was in the last-row seat nearest the exit.” Despite the presence of three professional women, the climate of the luncheon was very much that of an old boys’ get-together where talk of war or money would have been inevitable in any case. For Woollcott and the other veterans, it had been the best of all possible wars, but now they were concerned about their futures. In the summer of 1919, a time of great expectations and endless possibilities, they all wanted to retrieve careers, make contacts, get their books published and plays produced, be rich and famous, rise like cream to the top of the New York bottle. Therefore, they had come prepared to listen to Woollcott’s bragging and laugh at everybody’s jokes, just as if they were at a Booster Club bash in Toledo. Besides, it was an ideal way to spend a June day when the weather was fine and nobody felt much like working in the first place.

“Why don’t we do this every day?” somebody said as the luncheon began to break up. Since it sounded like a good idea, a polite murmur of approval was heard.

Walking back to the office with Sherwood and Benchley, Dorothy did not seriously expect they would do it every day. For that matter, there seemed to be no good reason to do it ever again.

Shortly after Eddie’s return in August 1919, Robert Sherwood photographed the Parkers seated side by side on a park bench. Eddie is wearing a civilian suit and a lopsided smile. Dorothy looks haggard with her mouth set in a grim line. Their bodies are not touching.

The war had taken visible toll of her husband. His features had roughened, become puffy; the sweet, angular boyishness was missing and so was the playful energy she had found so appealing. Anxious to see his family (his sister had died in childbirth while he was overseas), he had gone to Hartford for a while. When he returned to New York, he was in no great hurry to resume his career. Although he seemed glad to be home, he also appeared subdued, indifferent, restless.

Since the fall theater season was just getting under way, there were many evenings when Dorothy had to work. She came home only long enough to change into dress clothes before going downtown again. She expected Eddie to accompany her. Sometimes he did, if the show happened to be a musical. Serious plays bored him. On Sundays they visited the Drostes, where he enjoyed playing with Helen’s children.

At first, when Dorothy came home from the office weary and eager to pour out her headaches, Eddie was quick to commiserate. She felt able to relax, even cry if she felt like it. Before long he greeted a long face with impatience, wondering why she was bawling again when there never was anything the matter. She explained that she enjoyed crying just for the sake of it, but this made no sense to him. If she was crying, he would slam out, returning hours later when they would make up in bed.

In time, his addiction to morphine could no longer be concealed. When he finally agreed to seek treatment, it turned out to be a more complicated process than she had expected. It meant, she recalled, probably exaggerating, “one sanatorium after another.” Although she managed as well as she could, her husband was a tortured man and living with him could be harrowing. It was rumored that on more than one occasion she returned home from
Vanity Fair
to find him stretched out on several chairs with his head in the oven of their gas stove.

The return of Nast and Crowninshield at the end of August put a noticeable crimp in the high spirits of the cub lions. To show their affection, they festooned Crownie’s office with streamers of crepe paper and hung a welcome-home sign. He was not pleased.

The next morning Dorothy arrived late, but Benchley breezed in even later because Gertrude had gone into labor and he had taken her to the hospital. After lunch, he failed to return to the office. Again the next day no work got done because Dorothy and Sherry were busy offering congratulations on the birth of Robert Charles Benchley, Jr., and listening to Benchley’s stories of his experiences at the hospital. Dorothy, possessive about him, did not like to be reminded that he had a second life in which she had no part. Not that she had any desire to be Gertrude Benchley, who was stuck in Crestwood with a little boy and a new baby while her husband was away all day in the city enjoying himself with women like herself. This was exactly the sort of marriage that had always terrified Dorothy. Curiously, her indignation was aroused not at the thought of Gertrude’s entrapment, but at the thought of Mr. Benchley’s, a perception of his marriage that he did nothing to discourage. What she couldn’t bring herself to wonder was why he had chosen it. Instead, she preferred seeing him as a helpless victim, either of circumstance or of Gertrude, most likely the latter. Although she had yet to meet Mrs. Benchley, she already had formed a picture of her as a frumpish, housecoated female who smelled of germicidal soap, looked for buttons to sew before they fell off, and slept in curlers.

That fall was a time of growing tension, as Dorothy tried to please one man at home and other men at the office. However hard she tried, she could not seem to succeed in either place. She failed to understand why Crowninshield fussed about copy deadlines since she worked harder and longer than he had any right to expect. If she was sometimes tardy, it was for good reason because she spent many evenings at the theater. Aside from her drama column, she did additional theater pieces as “Helen Wells,” contributed verse, composed captions for Fish’s drawings, read manuscripts, and helped with editing and proofreading. In her opinion, the Nast organization not only should have felt more appreciative, it also owed her a raise. When she asked for one, Crowninshield promised that he would speak to Nast after the first of the year.

The other cub lions felt equally dissatisfied. In unguarded moments, they grumbled about their wages so loudly that eventually somebody in the office reported their complaints to Condé Nast. Immediately a memo was circulated warning that discussion of salaries was against company policy and cause for discharge. No sooner had the memo reached their desks than the three of them retaliated with a memo of their own. They resented “being told what we may and what we may not discuss,” and they also protested against “the spirit of petty regulation” that had made possible such an edict in the first place. Then they lettered placards spelling out their salaries and took perverse pleasure in strolling through the office with the provocative signs swinging around their necks.

A flabbergasted Nast responded to their home-grown union by doing nothing. However, Crowninshield became seriously alarmed and entreated them not to exhaust the publisher’s patience.