Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (13 page)

Still boiling, but trying to keep a low profile around the office, they allowed themselves to blow out steam over lunch. From time to time, they ate at the nearby Algonquin, whose name they had familiarly shortened to “the Gonk.” After his party in the summer, Aleck Woollcott had continued to lunch there and nearly always invited friends to join him. Many of those who had attended his lunch had been dropped because he found them boring. Whenever the
Vanity Fair
editors came by, they were welcomed, as were two newspaper reporters, Marc Connelly and George Kaufman, who had not been present at the June gathering. Connelly, who wrote theater news for the
Morning Telegraph
, was a cheerful, bald man of twenty-nine and had the manner of a talkative leprechaun. Born across the river from Pittsburgh in McKeesport, he had been living in New York for three years, since his ambition was to become a playwright. Nightly, after his paper went to press, he strolled uptown with George Kaufman to discuss ideas they might transform into salable plays.

Kaufman, Woollcott’s assistant and a
Times
drama reporter, was a shy, nervous man who also came from Pittsburgh. He was a year older than Connelly, but aside from an interest in the theater, no two men could have been less similar. Kaufman’s demeanor breathed gloom: narrow face, glasses, a high pompadour of dark hair, and a long skinny body about which he felt so self-conscious that he refused to be seen in a bathing suit. His phobias were disabling, his hypochondria of textbook dimensions. He had a horror of being touched and after a single year of marriage was unable to have sex with his wife, Beatrice, although apparently he experienced fewer problems with prostitutes.

Before long, Woollcott was coming to the Algonquin regularly, and manager Frank Case began automatically reserving a table for him. Since the hotel was patronized by celebrities such as Mary Pickford and Booth Tarkington, it was understandable that Case would not be impressed by the Woollcott contingent. To him they were “just a crowd of unusually agreeable folk.” Plainly, “none of them had any money,” which no doubt was the reason he directed the waiter to leave complimentary popovers and celery and olives on their table. The group took on a mangy aura on those days when they were joined by Heywood Broun, who usually looked like a one-man slum. Once, outside the hotel, a sympathetic passerby handed him a dime.

Case was astute in his judgment about their financial status. The
Vanity Fair
editors filled up on popovers and ordered eggs, the cheapest entrée on the menu. They reserved their energy for vilifying Nast, whose bookkeeper mentality they found disgusting. As they all were aware, Nast’s obsession in life was sex, a commodity he pursued with greed and aggression. It evidently mattered little to him if the woman was call girl, manicurist, or socialite. They suspected that he was using Frank Crowninshield to sponsor his entry into New York high society, and still worse, using his connections to find women. Benchley’s horror of libertines and social climbers made him label Nast’s organization as the ultimate “whited sepulchre.” Sherwood was quick to point out that employees were “treated like serfs” and “paid that way, too,” but that Crownie was not to blame because he himself was handled like a poor relation.

To take their minds off Condé Nast, they began to talk about writing a play together, perhaps a musical. Searching for a story, they came up with the idea of a man who is bored with his witty, glamorous wife and who chooses instead to have an extramarital frolic with the least splashy woman imaginable, a mouse who wants to breed and keep house, the two types of women corresponding exactly to Dorothy and Gertrude Benchley. Having found a twist, they began trying to develop an outline. “All we have to do is write it,” Benchley recorded optimistically in his diary, next to a reminder that he was four hundred dollars in debt.

The day before Christmas, Crowninshield summoned Dorothy into his office for a private talk. He made clear to her that she should not expect a raise, for he was displeased with the quality of the magazine in general and her work in particular. Unemotional, officious, his meticulously pressed gray suit matching his silvering hair, Crownie’s usual gentle manner drained away in niggling complaints. Even though she assumed that he was voicing Nast’s objections, she felt thoroughly upset. She did not understand how her mentor, the man who had admired her outspokenness, could now be denigrating what he once had endorsed and promoted.

“Vanity Fair
was a magazine of no opinion,” she later said, “but
I
had opinions.” She always remembered that day with great bitterness.

Chapter 5

THE ALGONQUIN ROUND TABLE

1920-1921

On the second Sunday in January 1920, Crownie invited her to tea at the Plaza Hotel. Since it was a cold, snowy day, he asked the headwaiter to brighten up the table with roses. First, he told her that he admired her extravagantly and always would and that he would be honored to publish anything she might care to write. He was sure that she would be famous some day. Then he announced that Plum Wodehouse was returning to
Vanity Fair
, so that her services were no longer required, unfortunately.

Dorothy, meanwhile, had remained silent. She was waiting for him to bring up the names of Florenz Ziegfeld, David Belasco, and Charles Dillingham, three powerful producers who had recently trotted onto Broadway stages a flock of turkeys, to which Dorothy had speedily applied euthanasia. All three men, coincidentally advertisers in the magazine, had subsequently complained to Condé Nast. But Crownie was letting that matter pass. He was silent too about the angry phone call he had received from Billie Burke, the actress wife of Flo Ziegfeld who recently had appeared in Somerset Maugham’s comedy
Caesar’s Wife
. Dorothy’s review of the show had noted that Burke coyly threw herself around the stage as if giving an impersonation of exotic dancer Eva Tanguay. Burke had taken umbrage at that comment and very likely her husband had encouraged her to make a fuss. Crownie had wound up apologizing to Billie Burke.

Crowninshield’s gallantry in awkward situations was well known. His gentlemanly enthusiasm for discretion took precedence over truthfulness, and as a result, the real reason for Dorothy’s dismissal was left unstated. He then suggested that if she wanted to work on “little pieces at home,” they could work out a satisfactory rate.

Though Dorothy was livid, she did not press for further explanations. The only thing left for her to do was to reject his proposal and order the most costly dessert on the menu.

After leaving the Plaza, she steamed home to telephone Benchley, who came into the city on the next train. Dorothy, Eddie, and Benchley hashed over and over the events of recent weeks until late into the night. Robert Sherwood had been fired after being told that the woman who gave music lessons to Nast’s daughter would be taking over his duties. Dorothy’s dismissal seemed genuinely unfair and undeserved because she had praised many productions and many individual performers, including Billie Burke. The upshot of their discussion was that Benchley decided to quit and wrote his letter of resignation when he arrived at the office the next morning. He labeled the magazine’s action in Dorothy’s case as “incredibly stupid and insincere,” but apart from that, he added, his job wasn’t attractive enough to keep him there without Dorothy Parker and Robert Sherwood.

His resignation stunned Crowninshield. In his opinion, writers came a dime a dozen but a decent managing editor, which he considered Benchley, was hard to find. When he understood that Benchley was serious, he agreed to accept the resignation and predicted he would become famous some day, one of the treacly severance speeches so typical of the man. Later, Edmund Wilson overheard him remark that it was a pity Benchley had overreacted and that the way he had carried on about Mrs. Parker had been absurd.

Dorothy was deeply moved by Benchley’s allegiance, which she would call “the greatest act of friendship I’d known,” and unquestionably it was a generous action for a man with a wife and two children to support. There was something fiercely loyal in Benchley’s temperament, something beyond normal devotedness. This was not the first time he had left a job because a colleague was being mistreated. Benchley edited a Sunday rotogravure section for the
Tribune
in 1918. The paper’s managing editor was his friend and Harvard classmate Ernest Gruening, whom the
Tribune
suspected of being pro-German, perhaps because of his name or his pacifist leanings—a pacifism Benchley shared. When Gruening was fired without a chance to clear himself, Benchley resigned the same day. Whether or not Dorothy knew of this incident, she still would have regarded his resignation from
Vanity Fair
as a sign of special fidelity.

On that Monday nothing could subdue the exuberance of the cub lions. As they laughed and boasted and ranted about Condé Nast, even the prospect of unemployment appeared trivial. After a giddy lunch at the Algonquin, they strolled back to the office, where they began telephoning people they knew to advertise their availability. Still full of high spirits once the office closed, they ploughed through the snow-covered street to the Gonk, where they were joined by Aleck Woollcott and Gertrude Benchley, who had offered no objections to her husband’s decision. Over dinner, questioned by interested reporters who had heard rumors of a walkout at
Vanity Fair
, they began to discuss their plans for the future. Benchley thought that it would have been pleasant if they could have continued at
Vanity Fair
, “but it probably is better for all of us to do things for ourselves.” Why shouldn’t they become successful free-lancers who could write what they liked, instead of working for people like Condé Nast? There was no telling what they could do on their own. Now it might even be possible for Dorothy and Benchley to work on the play they had been talking about.

By midnight Monday, Dorothy had stopped worrying. Getting fired might be a mercy. The next morning, she was sure of it.
The New York Times
carried a news story, sympathetically worded by Woollcott, announcing her dismissal from
Vanity Fair.
It was the sort of invaluable publicity that the unemployed can’t buy. Attention to her plight continued. Before the week was out, she received a second plug when Frank Adams wrote in The Conning Tower: “R. Benchley tells me he hath resigned his position with ‘Vanity Fair’ because they had discharged Dorothy Parker; which I am sorry for.”

The trio went through the motions of working. In the lobby of the building, they hung a poster that asked people to make CONTRIBUTIONS FOR MISS BILLIE BURKE, though nobody did. They amused themselves by pinning red discharge chevrons on their sleeves and parading raffishly around the office. Dorothy was proud to recall that “we behaved very badly.”

Later that same week the manufacture, sales, and transportation of liquor was banned in the United States, thus marking the start of thirteen years of Prohibition. It was an historical event of no particular interest to Dorothy, who to be sociable would accept a gin daisy at a party but nurse it all evening. Benchley, an ardent prohibitionist, hailed the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment as “too good to be true” and insisted that the country was taking a “step toward Utopia.”

Since just about the only people remaining on
Vanity Fair
’s editorial staff were the secretaries, Crowninshield asked Edmund Wilson to read a few manuscripts as a tryout. He apparently passed the trial because Crownie suggested he fill in for Benchley, which meant that he was given the duties of managing editor with neither the title nor the salary. Dorothy and Benchley, recalled Wilson, “joked about my being a ‘scab,’ but were kind about showing me the ropes and took me for the first time to the Algonquin.” At lunch they regaled him with office gossip. Their attempts to poison his mind fell on fertile ground because ever after he would think of Crowninshield as a “born courtier who lacks an appropriate court” and of Condé Nast as “the glossiest bounder I have ever known.”

On January 25, Dorothy and Sherwood cleaned out their desks and departed; Benchley’s contract required him to remain until the end of the month. Dorothy’s first free-lance job was writing subtitles for a movie, D. W. Griffith’s
Remodeling Her Husband
, which was being directed by Lillian Gish. When she went up to the newly opened Griffith studio in Mamaroneck, New York, she took Sherwood with her because she hoped that Gish might have work for him as well. Sherry was far more interested in moving pictures than she, but unfortunately Gish did not need him.

Her screen-writing job lasted a week. For a scene in which James Rennie is having his nails manicured in a barber shop, she borrowed from Hamlet’s speech to Horatio and wrote: “The divinity that shapes our ends.” Since this was more or less on a par with her caption writing for Vogue, she may have felt the work uncomfortably regressive. In any case, she sought no further movie work.