Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (17 page)

The more engulfed she felt by the unpalatable aspects of her marriage, the more extravagantly did she unfold her serial accounts of Eddie’s misadventures. The pratfalls she described to the Round Table were actually rooted in reality; chaos was his norm. Like most addicts, he leapfrogged naturally from crisis to crisis and created trouble out of thin air, then professed himself surprised at finding himself in a mess. It was not that Eddie nearly fell into manholes because he was accident prone, but rather that he was accident prone because he was an alcoholic. Whether or not Dorothy understood she was dealing with a sick man is not clear. Her preoccupation with him grew until he became the focus of her existence and nearly all her sentences began with the word he. She spoke of him endlessly and compulsively because she was unable to do otherwise.

If Eddie’s misfortunes fit an alcoholic archetype, her behavior likewise began to fall into the common patterns of those who live with alcoholics. When not trying to control his drinking by urging him to stop, she was busy covering up for him: The mornings he could not go to his office, she was the one who reported him ill; when he passed out, she put him to bed; when he was sick, she held his head. Increasingly her energy was sapped by efforts to keep him on the track, until she began to lose sight of the dangers facing herself.

Throughout 1921, she ground out bushels of fluff for
Life
or
The Saturday Evening Post
, much of it humorous light verse that appealed to the same audience who gobbled up Scott Fitzgerald’s frothy flapper stories. Fluff was short, silly, easy to write, and it paid the bills. Typical of her verse at this period was “Song for the First of the Month”:

Money cannot fill our needs,
Bags of gold have little worth;
Thoughtful ways and kindly deeds
Make a heaven here on earth.
Riches do not always score,
Loving words are better far.
Just one helpful act is more
Than a gaudy motor car.
Happy thoughts contentment bring
Crabbed millionaires can’t know;
Money doesn’t mean a thing,—
Try to tell the butcher so!

She judged such early work to be inferior; never would any of it be included in her collected writings.

Articles, by virtue of their length, required concentration, which she often lacked. When assignments failed to get done, letters had to be written, charm turned on, convincing excuses offered. To Thomas Masson, an editor at the
The Saturday Evening
Post and an admirer of her work, she wrote shameless alibis.

I am ashamed to offer you excuses again, but this has been a ghastly week for us. My husband has had an attack of appendicitis, and they are not sure yet what is going to happen about it. They are still freezing it, which is a pleasant process, and they think they may still get it to listen to reason that way.

Most likely Masson, who had worked with Dorothy at Life, knew her well enough not to be taken in by the sad story of Eddie’s frozen appendix, but he did consider her the best woman humorist in the country. At first she had completely fooled him with her luminous eyes and enthusiastic promises. Then, Masson recalled, “you sit around and wait for her to finish what she has begun. That is, if she has begun. The probability is that she hasn’t begun.”

When he inquired about her progress, she would say that the idea they had agreed upon was rotten. Be that as it may, she was working on it anyway. Next, he would be driving through Connecticut when he would stop at a speakeasy and see Dorothy drinking with Heywood Broun and Marc Connelly. Did she pretend that she didn’t see him?—certainly not. Her greeting would be warm, her manner unconcerned. If not for the fact that she was recovering from a near-fatal illness, she said, she would have finished his piece long ago. Masson could never bring himself to reproach her. Months later, after he had given up, she would send him the article.

Tom Masson found her exasperating because he felt she was “a born artist” who could easily win an important place in American literature if only she settled down and wrote. But “she refuses to write,” he reflected sadly. “All of her things are asides.”

Eddie blamed her for everything. He called her a nag who made his life miserable, so that it was necessary for him to get drunk. By now she was accustomed to walking on eggs with him, never able to predict when a casual remark or an unthinking glance would be misinterpreted and send him spinning into rage or melancholia. Inexplicable as it seemed to her, he would be friendly in one breath, spitting abuse in the next.

Margalo Gillmore, eating one day at the Round Table, watched the expression on Dorothy’s face and thought that it reminded her of a cocker spaniel. “She had eyes like one of those lovely, sad dogs, eyes with deep circles under them.” Gillmore decided that she must have been weeping into her pillow all night to get eyes like that.

Although Eddie frequently threatened to leave, she couldn’t or wouldn’t take him seriously. Nor did she consider leaving him. Marriage was supposed to be forever, a view Eddie presumably shared because he did not carry out his threats. They struggled on as best they could.

Unhappy as she was in her marriage, she did not notice other couples having a better time of it and there were some whom she judged to be doing far worse.

Robert Sherwood introduced her to Scott Fitzgerald and his bride shortly after their marriage, when they were honeymooning at the Biltmore Hotel and working strenuously to carve out daring reputations for themselves. The management requested their departure. Dorothy already knew Scott slightly, having met him in 1919 when he was working at a ninety-dollar-a-week job for an advertising agency and living in a dismal room in Morningside Heights. Penniless, talking about a novel he wanted to write, he had regaled Dorothy with stories about someone he planned to marry, referring to her as “the most beautiful girl in Alabama
and
Georgia,” even though he was in the midst of a torrid liaison with an English actress. Eventually he had drifted back to the Midwest, but he had returned to the city after selling his novel to Scribner’s, and with him he had brought his Zelda Sayre.

Dorothy suggested to Edmund Wilson that they meet for lunch with the Fitzgeralds. They went to the Algonquin, where they sat not at the Round Table but at one of the banquettes. Dorothy quickly broke the ice.

“This looks like a road company of the Last Supper,” she said.

She believed Scott to be a gifted writer, but found his wife ordinary. She chewed gum and looked like a Kewpie doll. “She was very blonde with a candy box face and a little bow mouth, very much on a small scale and there was something petulant about her.” If Zelda didn’t get her way, she turned sulky.

Whatever Zelda may have lacked as an individual, the Fitzgeralds impressed her as a couple, looking robust with health, as though they had “just stepped out of the sun.” When they moved into a flat around the corner from her building, she visited them. It was hard to understand how Scott got any writing done because the place was a mess, with overflowing ashtrays and unmade beds. Their lives seemed to consist of an endless round of parties and hangovers. If Scott’s drinking rivaled Eddie’s, Zelda’s consumption was impressive too. Toward the end of the year, despite earnings of twenty thousand dollars, Scott told Dorothy that he was completely broke. She lent him a hundred dollars. Not long afterward, Scott admitted that the money had disappeared. He suspected Zelda had hidden it. They fought constantly and themselves predicted their marriage couldn’t succeed.

While most of Dorothy’s wedded friends were less noisy about their troubles than the Fitzgeralds, their marriages seemed no better. Benchley—or Fred, as she had begun to call him—was in a dreadful mess. George Kaufman had stopped sleeping with Beatrice. Frank Adams bedded a succession of young women, whose names he flaunted in his column for his wife and a million New Yorkers to read over their morning coffee. Dorothy could find nothing inspiring about the marriages of Heywood Broun and Harold Ross. Ruth Hale and Jane Grant, paragons of feminist strength, may have kept their maiden names, but they spent much of their time running households and entertaining their husbands’ friends, exactly like those oppressed wives who had relinquished their names.

Another marriage that had gone sour was her sister’s. After a dozen years and two children with George Droste, Helen had finally made the difficult decision to call it quits. Ever since the Droste bakery had been sold to the National Biscuit Company, George had been assured of wealth whether he cared to work or not; mostly he did not. While Dorothy’s contact with Bert and Mate was increasingly infrequent, she remained close to “Mrs. Drots.” She confided in her about the troubles with Eddie and was equally familiar with Helen’s discontentment and George’s infidelities. Her sister had never supported herself, but was accustomed to money and maids. How she might manage on her own was problematic. Helen also feared that if she divorced George he might remarry, sire more children, and disinherit Bill and Lel. The obvious solution was not to divorce him, but that meant Helen would never be able to remarry either. To Dorothy it seemed inconceivable that she and Helen, born well-off and having made so-called good marriages, could be working their way down to poverty. Life was growing increasingly complex for the daughters of J. Henry Rothschild.

Being alone terrified her. It was fine when she felt happy, but if she happened to be melancholy she got “the howling horrors.” With her Round Table friends, who made her feel funny and lovable, the howling horrors could be kept at a distance.

She closed the year 1921 at a New Year’s Eve party given by Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun in the brownstone they had newly purchased on the Upper West Side. It was a large, noisy gathering, some two hundred guests crowded into the first floor, which had been emptied of furniture and filled up with folding chairs so that anyone who wished to could practice the old custom of jumping into the new year. In place of food Ruth and Heywood provided nutrition by brewing up a huge vat of gin and orange juice, which was replenished several times during the evening.

“A great party and merry as can be,” wrote F.P.A., noting that the house had been aglitter with celebrities. “Saw there Mistress Claire Sheridan in the prettiest pink dress ever I saw her wear.... Saw H.G. Wells, too.... Miss M. Leech there too and Mistress Pinna Cruger, one prettier than the other; but I loved Mistress Dorothy Parker the best of any of them, and loath to leave her, which I did not do till near five in the morning, and so home.”

Chapter 6

PAINKILLERS

1922-1923

She could never quite remember the day when she discovered that a drink could make her feel better. It was not hard to remember when Robert Benchley made that discovery: the evening of the championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier. She had been celebrating Dempsey’s four-round victory at Tony Soma’s speakeasy with Robert Sherwood and Scott and Zelda, when Benchley came in and joined them. Although he drank nothing stronger than coffee, it was not unusual to find him at Tony’s, where he was apt to get preachy, always tut-tutting Dorothy about her Tom Collinses and grumpily sermonizing that alcohol made people act unlike themselves. That evening, however, was different. At the urging of his friends, he agreed to sample an orange blossom. When the waiter placed the drink on the white tablecloth, Benchley took a tentative sip, pulled a face, then put the glass down carefully before pronouncing his verdict.

“I hope this place is closed by the police,” he said.

One rainy night several weeks later, having meanwhile broadened his sampling of medicinal spirits from orange blossoms to whiskey sours, he left Tony’s with Don Stewart. Coming toward them down West Forty-ninth Street they saw a man holding an umbrella over his head. Stewart ducked under the umbrella.

“Yale Club, please,” he instructed the astonished pedestrian.