Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (21 page)

Wylie, reputedly a femme fatale, was thirty-seven. Her personal life had been marked by a number of tragedies, including the suicides of a brother and sister, and also by the juiciest sort of scandal. She had been born Elinor Hoyt into a socially prominent Philadelphia family. In 1906 she married a handsome, well-born schizophrenic named Philip Hichborn and bore a son. Four years later, leaving behind her infant, she ran away with Horace Wylie, a married Washington attorney and lived with him in Europe under an assumed name. Wylie suffered from periods of despondency. Once, the story goes, she appeared at the apartment of Katherine Anne Porter, saying that she planned to kill herself and Porter was the only friend she wished to bid farewell. An annoyed Porter replied, “Well, good-bye Elinor,” and shut the door. Having finally married Wylie, she had divorced him and now planned to marry the poet William Rose Benét.

If the Ford parties were made bearable for Dorothy by the presence of Elinor Wylie, sometimes she encountered less welcome people such as Mercedes de Acosta, a face out of the past. The little rich girl who had been Dorothy’s ally at Blessed Sacrament was the author of a novel and two books of verse. A twenties jet-setter who numbered among her intimate friends Eleanora Duse, Marlene Dietrich, and Sarah Bernhardt, Mercedes had married, but it appeared to be a marriage of companionship because her affairs with women were an open secret. Despite their common cause against the nuns at the age of seven, Dorothy was far from appreciative at seeing Mercedes, nor did she wish to be reminded of Blessed Sacrament, where she had spent some of the worst years of her life.

Sailboats from the Manhasset Yacht Club dotted the choppy green water of the Sound when Dorothy made her first visit to the pleasure domes of the very rich. The modest resort towns along the ragged southern shore of Long Island had been familiar to her since childhood, but the north shore constituted an entirely different world. It was not called the Gold Coast for nothing. On East Shore Road in the town of Great Neck, Herbert and Maggie Swope rented an ornate old mansion overlooking the bay. Across an empty field was Ring Lardner’s house, while Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived on nearby Gateway Drive. It was the Swopes’ house that Dorothy made her weekend headquarters throughout most of the twenties.

Herbert Bayard Swope was considered by his contemporaries to be the foremost newspaper reporter of his generation. He was big and overbearing, with the velocity of a human hurricane, the tastes of a Roman emperor, and hair the color of carrots. Cocksure, bouncing from one enthusiasm to the next, he was a compulsive talker and namedropper. The Round Tablers held a high opinion of the man, which had nothing to do with the fact that at one time or another he had employed most of them. Woollcott, F.P.A., Deems Taylor, even Benchley for a brief period, were all
World
columnists, as was Heywood Broun who said of Swope that if he sounded like a big bluff that was only ten percent right. “He is a big bluff but in addition to that he’s got the stuff.” Having the stuff meant that Swope had won the first Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1917 for his work as a war correspondent and had gone on to become executive editor of the
World
three years later. Although the paper did not belong to him, he often behaved as if it did and its owner Ralph Pulitzer didn’t seem to mind. When Swope retired from the
World
in 1928, at the age of forty-six, he sold his interest for six million dollars.

Swope and his wife liked to live on a lavish scale. At Great Neck they turned their house into a summer playground for friends and assorted gatecrashers. Their parties served as the inspiration and model for Scott Fitzgerald as he began writing
The Great Gatsby
that summer. Seldom were formal invitations issued. People jumped into their cars and drove until, somehow, they ended at the Swopes’ door. The world and its mistress, as Fitzgerald wrote, gathered at Gatsby’s house and “twinkled hilariously on the lawn.” They chatted endlessly about theater gossip and antiques; they drank and passed out and revived, and they talked stock tips and horse racing. Some of those who accepted Herbert Swope’s hospitality in Great Neck paid him, as they did Jay Gatsby, the subtle tribute of knowing little about him.

Across the way, sipping Canadian ale on his porch, Ring Lardner observed the Swope pageant with annoyance. He seemed irked that his neighbor was running “an almost continuous house party.” There were large numbers of people roaming the woods because the Swopes liked to organize treasure hunts that sent guests scurrying through the shrubbery in search of sapphire cufflinks and other gewgaws. Sometimes the city folks got confused and forgot where they were staying, “for they wander in at all hours demanding refreshment and entertainment at the place that happens to be nearest at the moment,” Lardner complained. Maggie Swope, who smugly called her house “an absolutely seething bordello of interesting people,” showed no trace of concern for her censorious neighbors. Scott Fitzgerald happily described Great Neck as “a very drunken town full of intoxicated people and retired debauchees + actresses,” and thought it was wonderful. Others claimed that anything could happen there. Despite Lardner’s grumbling that the town was becoming a “social sewer,” his complaints seem forced and he too was probably enjoying the spectacle.

The Long Island season began in the spring and continued until Thanksgiving. During these months it was Dorothy’s habit to arrive at the Swopes’ on late Saturday afternoon and settle down on the verandah overlooking the circular driveway with a glass of imported Scotch, all of the Swope liquor having been tested and certified by a competent pharmacist. There she waited for the other guests to assemble. At that hour, it was not unusual to find that her host and hostess had not yet risen for the day, but she generally had plenty of company. Frank Adams might be there, as would Ruth Gordon and her husband Gregory Kelly, Robert and Mary Sherwood, and Ethel Barrymore; Heywood Broun and Aleck Woollcott would be organizing a croquet game; invariably she found an assortment of politicians, gamblers, and poets. Often Dorothy got into conversation with a close friend of Swope’s, a man with a thatch of white hair who she learned was Bernard Baruch. Despite their talks, he continued to mystify her. She knew that he was speculator-rich, negotiated armistices, and kept going to Washington to see President Coolidge, but still she could not figure out exactly what he did. There were two things that would always bewilder her, she joked: how zippers worked and the exact function of Bernard Baruch.

At the Swopes’, tea was served at six or seven, dinner at midnight. No guest of his, Swope boasted, went to bed before three in the morning, although some of them passed out long before that. Maggie Swope engaged two shifts of servants and spent a thousand dollars a week on groceries. If ever Dorothy felt hungry in the middle of the night, she could order a steak or a bottle of champagne. When she awoke on Sundays at noon and rang for breakfast, it was brought on a tray with pink breakfast china that matched the pink linen napkins, along with an assortment of newspapers. The Swopes’ stylish yet vulgar way of living attracted and disgusted Dorothy, who hated their money but wished it was hers. She never wore out her welcome at their house because the only unforgivable sin in their eyes was dullness. Dorothy, never dull, was the perfect guest, who could always rise to the occasion. Seated once next to Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland, she listened politely as a series of questions were addressed to the governor about the state of the union. When this high-toned colloquy was interrupted by a drunk’s noisy belch, she turned to the offender and said she would ask the governor to pardon him.

Dorothy repaid the Swopes’ hospitality by giving them a dog. Their collection of pedigreed pets included an imported English pug that had been a gift from Baruch, two Pekinese, and several German shepherds. Her contribution to their menagerie of purebreds was a cur she rescued on Sixth Avenue after she saw a truck driver kicking it aside. Scooping up the filthy animal, she took her to Neysa’s studio, gave her a bath, and named her Amy. The dog proved to be a good-natured coquette whose only bad habit was a perverse craving for Neysa’s rose madder paints, so Dorothy decided that Amy would be happier living in the country, perhaps in fancy country like Great Neck. The idea of Amy the mongrel installed in the Swopes’ kennel pleased her greatly.

Other estates where Dorothy became a regular weekend house guest included Ralph Pulitzer’s mansion in Manhasset and Averell Harriman’s family seat, Arden House, on the Hudson River. On one visit there, Dorothy took the precaution of bringing along a box of candy because she found the food inedible. Once each summer the banker Otto Kahn permitted Aleck Woollcott to plan an entire weekend and dictate the guest list. Woollcott was free to invite whomever he wished, so long as they were not stupid or boring. Dorothy and fifty or sixty others who happened to be in Woollcott’s good graces at the moment trooped out to Kahn’s 126-room French chateau at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Addie Kahn, having checked Woollcott’s guest list, would flee to New York, leaving her husband alone to entertain “your zoo.” At Kahn’s nine-million-dollar monument to the golden age of capitalism, Dorothy and the Round Tablers consumed fountains of mint juleps and gin rickeys, played Ping-Pong and charades and wild, emotional games of croquet that knocked over garden furniture and broke windows in the greenhouse. Their behavior at meals was not much better. “Can I order from the menu?” Frank Adams asked the footman standing behind his chair. “Or do I have to take the blue-plate special?” Kahn, presiding over the table in the grand ballroom with his dachshunds at his feet, only smiled.

Being a professional guest had decided drawbacks, and there were times when Dorothy accepted invitations against her better judgment. Only after she had arrived and realized her mistake too late did she begin groaning to herself: “I knew it would be terrible. Only I didn’t think it would be as bad as this. This isn’t just plain terrible; this is fancy.” She would be stuck for fifty-six hours with people she abhorred and forced to sleep in a room that reminded her of an iron maiden and drink highballs so lethal that she feared a drop on her bare skin would scar her for life. What she hated most were hostesses who announced that maybe Dorothy would consent to recite “some of her little things for us” after dinner. Dorothy gritted her teeth. “Maybe she would,” she muttered under her breath. “And maybe there was no war.”

Long Island weekends ended on Monday mornings when Dorothy caught an early train to the city. In a bad mood or hungover, she blamed her condition on the Long Island Railroad, which forced her to climb off the train at Jamaica in Queens and board another train. “No matter where I go,” she complained, “I always have to change at Jamaica.” She bet the readers of
Life
that if she embarked on a nonstop transatlantic journey she would be required to change at Jamaica. It was terrible.

So was going back to her flat under the eyesore El on Sixth Avenue.

Eddie, meanwhile, continued to live with her. During the summer of 1923, they spent a week together in Vermont, and now and then he accompanied her to Swope weekends. Like the rest of the Round Tablers, Dorothy and Eddie had become passionate croquet players. Eddie usually teamed up with Frank Adams, while Dorothy joined Neysa McMein’s team. When darkness fell, the Swope guests flooded the lawn with their car headlights and went on playing until dinner was served at midnight. As fervent as Dorothy could get about the game, she felt this was going too far. Watching from the Lardner porch, she shook her head. “Jesus Christ,” she exclaimed. “The heirs of the ages.”

For a change, things were running smoothly for her. She no longer wrote for
The Saturday Evening Post
, because after a boring weekend at George Horace Lorimer’s Pennsylvania estate Dorothy had made unflattering remarks that had got back to him. She continued to contribute regularly to
Life
and also began working for the Bell Syndicate, which paid exceptionally well. She and Neysa teamed up to produce a series of syndicated pieces about celebrities. She interviewed and wrote a profile of the famous person while Neysa sketched a portrait. These assignments hardly felt like work because many of their subjects—Charlie Chaplin, Irene Castle—were people they knew. When assigned to interview Luis Angel Firpo, the Argentinian heavyweight who was preparing to fight Jack Dempsey, they went to Atlantic City where Firpo was training and made a party of it.

Although Dorothy had few memories of her childhood or her mother, she intuitively disliked the Jersey shore, felt uncomfortable about spending even so much as a day there, and sometimes apologized for having had the bad luck to be born in West End. “I was cheated out of the distinction of being a native New Yorker, because I had to go and get born while the family was spending the Summer in New Jersey, but, honestly, we came back to New York right after Labor Day, so I nearly made the grade.” On this occasion, she persuaded Benchley to join them. Flanked and shielded by her two friends, she advanced on the New Jersey coastline as if she were a doughboy revisiting Argonne Forest. Firpo’s house resembled “one of those Atlantic City chalets that looks as if a cuckoo ought to spring from the door every half hour and call the time.” Dorothy was a Dempsey fan but she decided that the “Wild Bull of the Pampas” was “a very nice boy.” After watching him train for a while, they went off in search of fun and wound up at the greyhound races. In contrast with Great Neck, Atlantic City was filthy and the ocean looked so unappetizing they did not bother to go swimming. It was “a horrible dump,” Benchley declared, crowded with “the worst bunch of people I have seen outside of Coney Island.”

In the fall Charles MacArthur returned to the city and his old job at the American, and he rejoined his friends at the Round Table. Dorothy resigned herself to the fact that she could not avoid him, especially since he had become chummy with Benchley. At the end of September, when Jane Grant, Harold Ross, and Aleck Woollcott finally threw a housewarming party for their new communal house on West Forty-seventh Street, she and Charlie got together with Harpo Marx to rent a street carousel so that the neighborhood children might have rides.