Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (16 page)

She excelled at punning word games. When asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence, she answered, “You may lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”

She was developing a bad habit of flattering people to their faces and then condemning them behind their backs. “Did you ever meet such a shit!” she would exclaim. Such denunciations amused some people, shocked and disturbed others, and still others like Edmund Wilson simply reconciled themselves to accepting her capacity for “treachery.” Dorothy acknowledged her compulsion to embrace and denounce by saying, “I cannot keep my face shut” around idiots. It may have been wicked but “as God hears me, I am perfectly justified.”

It also got laughs. She once began ripping apart someone who had just left a party. A friend of the departed begged her to stop. The poor woman was a nice person who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

“Not if it was buttoned up,” Dorothy retorted.

Eddie had accepted her career before and during the war but now discovered that it had assumed unexpected and baffling dimensions: He was married to a woman who was becoming a celebrity. Not only was he temperamentally unsuited to the position of consort, but Dorothy’s friends, with the exception of Benchley, who knew how to make everyone comfortable, made him feel conspicuously out of place. Parkie was, Marc Connelly decided, “a quiet, pleasant young man who was out of his element. He couldn’t keep up with Dottie.” At a party at Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun’s, Dorothy introduced him to Rebecca Bernstien, Broun’s assistant at the
Tribune
. “I’m almost certain it was his first public appearance after returning from the army. Dorothy said, ‘I want you to meet my little husband.’ There stood a shy, slim, blond young man who impressed me as having been well brought up and nice enough to know but he seemed very embarrassed and had little to say. I thought to myself that it was shabby of her to introduce him in that way.” Parties where Adams, Kaufman, and Benchley were busy trotting out their routines for each other tended to make most people appear dim-witted. Eddie felt totally inadequate. It was just a matter of time before he refused to socialize with the Round Table. “I didn’t see him after that,” Bernstien said. “I don’t even remember people referring to him very much.”

However invisible Eddie may have seemed, he was present in spirit at the Round Table. Dorothy began to concoct funny stories about him, almost as if he were a Mack Sennett character who careered from one perilous episode to the next, dropping his drawers as he went. Practically every day, in her comic scenarios, dreadful accidents sought him out: He almost got run over; he broke his arm while sharpening a pencil; he narrowly avoided plunging into an open manhole while reading
The Wall Street Journal.
Dorothy’s delivery was deadpan as she strewed banana peels in his path. Her friends broke up hearing about the various pickles Eddie blundered into. Soon they looked forward to hearing about the hapless Parkie’s latest misadventure and egged her on by inquiring about the state of his health. This was her cue: Had they heard about so-and-so’s funeral, she asked. Since she and Eddie arrived early at the mortuary, he decided to pay his respects to the deceased. Kneeling before the coffin, he inadvertently brushed against a knob, gears whirred, a door popped open, and before either of them could react both casket and corpse had disappeared into the flames of the crematorium. They ran out a side door before anyone noticed. It had been a ghastly experience for poor Eddie.

In the earliest days of the Round Table nobody strained to make an impression. Conversation was relaxed and stories flowed unrehearsed. It never occurred to them that their remarks might be worth recording for posterity, although Frank Adams occasionally printed those that had tickled him.

In fact, Frank Adams could be considered the Boswell of the Round Table. He unapologetically filled his column with plugs for their various activities and kept a running chronicle of the most mundane aspects of their lives:

... so to Mistress Dorothy’s and found A. Woollcott there in the finest costume ever I saw off the stage; spats and a cut-away coat, and a silk high hat among the grand articles of his apparel.

... so to a great party at Neysa’s, and had some talk with Miss Ruth Gillmore and D. Parker.

... and so to dinner with R. Benchley and Mistress Dorothy Parker, and then with her to see “Back to Methusaleh.”

To luncheon and found there Mrs. Dorothy Parker and Rob Sherwood and he feeling ill, and was for taking train to Pelham, but I drove him there with D. and she back to the city with me, very pleasant and no chatterer at all.

... and so uptown, and met Mistress Neysa McMein and Dottie Parker, and they asked me to walk with them and look in windows, which I promised to do if they would not beg me to buy them this or that, and they said they would not, but they teased for everything they saw, from emerald necklaces to handkerchiefs. But I was firm and bought them never a thing.

So Dorothy, it seemed, idled away her afternoons window-shopping and partied through the nights but never was she glimpsed sweating over a typewriter—to the old lady in Dubuque, this was the perfect fantasy of the literary life, the very embodiment of New York sophistication.

Sometimes Frank Adams could not resist repeating his own jokes for his newspaper audience. One Monday, after spending the weekend with Harold Ross in the country, he reported to the table that they had gone tobogganing. What did Ross look like tobogganing, they asked.

“Well,” Adams answered, “you know what he looks like not tobogganing.”

Ross, a favorite target of their ribbing, never got off a memorable crack himself. Benchley’s appearance at the table usually meant gentle humor and a comic description of his daily vicissitudes. Hurrying out of a restaurant, he asked the uniformed man at the door to get him a taxi. The man informed him frostily that he happened to be a rear admiral in the United States Navy. “That’s all right,” Benchley said, “then get me a battleship.”

A wag passing Marc Connelly’s chair at the Round Table patted his bald, pink head. “Your head,” he remarked, “feels just like my wife’s behind.” Connelly reached up to touch himself. “Why, so it does,” he replied.

Woollcott’s standard repartee relied heavily on insults. “Shut up, you Christ killer,” he hissed at George Kaufman, who rose to his feet and threw down his napkin. This was the last time, Kaufman said, that he was going to tolerate slurs about his race. He was going to leave, “and I hope that Mrs. Parker will walk out with me—halfway.”

Dorothy spoke infrequently. One of her greatest talents, decided Charles Brackett, was to make a perfect comeback or to say nothing. Peggy Wood noticed that “she didn’t waste them on nobodies,” while Frank Sullivan compared her to W. C. Fields in that her funniest jokes were lost because their obscenity made them unprintable. Marc Connelly thought her best lines were spontaneous. In the street she approached a taxi.

“I’m engaged,” the cabbie said.

“Then be happy,” Dorothy told him.

The Round Tablers were having the time of their lives. Very quickly they had become essential to one another, the way a shining new love drives out all other thoughts. Theirs was a special affection, magical, fierce, childlike. They were remarkably tolerant of each other’s pathologies, which in some cases they shared, and rivalry was curiously absent. Eating lunch soon became the least part of it. They met for breakfast and dinner, slept together, worked cooperatively, and went on group vacations (and on Neysa’s honeymoon after she married a mining engineer). They patronized the same physician, Woollcott’s doctor, who built a lucrative practice administering to their ailments, dispensing diet and sleeping pills and offering his all-purpose remedy for hangovers, colds, and indigestion—high colonic irrigations. The Round Table also acquired its own unofficial psychotherapist.

Always showing off for each other, they could be reasonably confident of receiving attention and appreciation. Their meetings were boisterous enough to attract disapproving stares from outsiders, but they took no notice. They were always their own best audience and needed no one else. If they listened endlessly to each other’s jokes, they also paid attention to each other’s routine headaches, though they tended to hide the big troubles. They were quick to offer comfort. Before long, they began to devour each other’s essences, cannibalizing the lives of the group as raw materials for their own writings. Dorothy was perhaps the first to do so.

Their pleasure in each other’s company had another side. If they found themselves apart for any length of time, they suffered from separation anxiety. Marc Connelly remembered that sometimes after leaving the Rose Room, they would reassemble at somebody’s apartment and then spend the rest of the afternoon discussing where they were going to eat that evening. Noel Coward was amazed to run into the same group of them three times in one day, in three different places. “But don’t they ever see anyone
bloody
else?” he said.

Marc Connelly could see nothing strange about all this. “We just hated being apart,” he said.

It also was true that not one of them could tolerate being alone, which is a different thing entirely. In fact, the existence of such a group made it possible for them as individuals to avoid loneliness and self-examination. Their habit was to shove the troublesome parts of life, all the painful stuff they found hard to acknowledge, under Frank Case’s big table and pull the cloth down.

One morning in June 1921, Dorothy was visiting the offices of Life, when she was introduced to Donald Ogden Stewart, a new acquaintance of Benchley’s and Sherwood’s. At noon they went to lunch at the Plaza Hotel for a change. When Sherwood returned to work afterward, Stewart accompanied Dorothy and Benchley back to their office. They strolled down Fifth Avenue in the sunshine with Stewart feeling euphoric and thinking that he had found two people who understood him so completely that it probably wasn’t necessary to explain his ideas or even to finish his sentences. That day, he said later, he fell in love with both of them and would remain so for the rest of his life. Stewart was in his mid-twenties, a likeable, attractive Ohioan who had come to the city only six months earlier from Columbus and established himself and his widowed mother in a tiny Village apartment. Bespectacled and prematurely balding, insecure and obsessed with money and success, he was a 1916 Yale graduate who dreamed of becoming a millionaire, but his brief experience in the business world had proved him a misfit there. A meeting in St. Paul with Scott Fitzgerald, another ambitious, impoverished Ivy Leaguer who felt like an outsider, had been fateful. The success of Fitzgerald’s recent novel
This Side of Paradise
had inspired Stewart to try his luck at a writing career. When he met Dorothy and Benchley, he had sold several humor pieces to
Vanity Fair
and
The Smart Set
, but he remained nervous about his ability to earn a living as a satirist.

Dorothy found him amusing. Like herself, he was fascinated by wealth. He was, she noticed, eager to be “an enlivener of the incessant dull hours of the rich.” Even though he could not resist presenting himself as a “gay dog,” she sensed his serious side. She also praised his writing. Whenever an editor criticized him or rejected a piece, she was quick to take his side and dismiss the editor as dog excrement. If he had a hangover, she pretended to have a worse one. It was this kind of warmth and attention that Stewart badly needed.

If he felt any sexual attraction toward her, it must have been quickly suppressed. He thought she was “absolutely devastating” with her petite figure and gorgeous big eyes, an “imp-at-large,” but she also was a married woman—however unhappily made no difference—and he fell into the same comradely relationship with her that Benchley had. Soon Stewart was a regular visitor at Dorothy’s apartment and at Neysa’s studio. He never was at his ease at the Round Table, because he felt obliged to say something funny, nor did he enjoy exchanging the type of barbs that Woollcott doted on. His friendship with Dorothy and Benchley provided him with constant sustenance. The others struck him as basically unfriendly. Before he joined them for lunch at the Algonquin, he fortified himself with several cocktails.