Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (34 page)

She was leading a hectic social life and staying up late, drinking a lot, but handling it well. Only occasionally did she suffer from incapacitating hangovers, which she jokingly referred to as “the rams.”

Most of the time, she kept her hangovers to herself and insisted that she felt “perfectly fine,” a phrase she repeated so regularly that she finally used it as the title for a short story.

Dorothy settled into a nonsexual friendship with Seward Collins. Recently, Sewie had gone into partnership with Burton Rascoe to purchase
The Bookman
and now was pestering her to contribute fiction. There had been a brief, friendly interlude with Howard Dietz, the MGM publicity director who was trying to break into theater as a songwriter. Their involvement did not get publicized out of deference to Dietz’s wife Betty, but in any case it soon ended. In fact, she was sweeping all males from her life except John Garrett, with whom she had begun an affair. Although Garrett practically had a neon sign emblazoned across his forehead that blinked I DONT WANT TO GET MARRIED, Dorothy couldn’t see it. She adored “his boyishness and gaiety and sweetness.” There was no denying he was striking, very tall and slim with dark brown hair, broad shoulders, and elegant clothes. At the age of thirty-five, he had never wed. He was a flirt who enjoyed being pursued and competed for by flotillas of women, especially those who were married or divorced. He also liked nothing better than to play them off against each other. In his Murray Hill flat overlooking a garden, there was a considerable collection of cigarette cases and monogrammed dressing gowns, which had been presented to him by hopeful women.

Enamored once again with a handsome, Gentile, corporate type, wearing Roman numerals behind his name, who was in no other way remarkable, she found John Wiley Garrett II as fascinating as she once had found Edwin Pond Parker II. Although decently educated, he was a man whose interests were limited to business and sports. He shared neither her radical tendencies nor her love of literature. Later, trying to remember what they had talked about, she retained a foggy impression that he spoke about the war and about his clubs at Williams, but she couldn’t be certain because “we were both pretty fairly tight” most of the time. Alcohol transformed him into a fascinating lover, but the reality was that they had nothing in common.

In the early months of the affair, although she never mentioned John by name, she knitted the private details of their relationship into a number of columns and stories. She had a friend, she wrote in
The New Yorker,
“who is trying to make a lady of me, and the first step in the uphill climb has been the gaining of my promise to keep from employing certain words,” which was why she couldn’t reveal her true opinion of Sinclair Lewis’s latest novel. In the end, she coyly identified the forbidden word as
rotten
but only because the magazine would not print her favorite word,
shit
. John, incidentally, seems to have resented her position as literary critic and complained that she never wrote about anything that people read, so the next week she reviewed something he did read, the tabloid comic strips. He further complained that her drinking and late hours were a bad influence on him.

His behavior maddened her, especially his habit of breaking his promises to telephone. She would sit by the phone waiting and agonizing, resisting the impulse to phone him; when women phoned men, she wrote, “they know you are thinking about them and wanting them, and that makes them hate you.” She decided that men “hate you whenever you say anything you really think. You always have to keep playing little games.” For fear of losing him, she tried to contain her jealousy, but she continued to distrust him.

At Christmas she could not deny feeling unhappy. “Sunk I am. And in a big way. It is my conviction that civilization is about to collapse.” John’s faithlessness was scarcely news, but she had hoped to break the pattern. What surprised her was his promiscuity and his stamina for deception. He was not a bit ashamed of himself and took few precautions to conceal his exploits, which Dorothy rightfully interpreted as provocative behavior. One evening Heywood Broun and Rebecca Bernstien, who were to dine with them, plowed up the stairs to Garrett’s apartment only to find themselves with front-row seats to a confrontational scene between John, Dorothy, and a musical-comedy actress. “It was a screaming match,” Bernstien remembered, “except that it was Dorothy who was doing all the screaming. I can’t remember the exact obscenities she used but she was very, very graphic.”

“Let us leave,” Broun whispered. They shut the door and crept away.

The winter of 1928, after a four-year separation, she finally filed for divorce from Eddie. To avoid publicity, she slipped into Hartford and, before a committee of the Superior Court, testified at a private hearing in which she cited several unpleasant episodes from her married life. The committee recommended that she be granted a divorce on the ground of intolerable cruelty. Eddie declined to contest. They did not see one another on the day of the hearing, nor did they ever meet again.

Several months after the divorce, Eddie married Anne O’Brien, a probation officer employed by the Hartford Juvenile Court. They moved to the small town of Haddam, Connecticut.

Five years later, on January 7, 1933, Eddie died of Ipral (a barbituric acid derivative) poisoning. The medical examiner gave the cause of death as a self-administered overdose of a sleeping powder but concluded it was accidental. A different cause was cited by Eddie’s physician, who attributed the death to “an acute septic condition resulting from surgical procedure.” His patient, he said, recently had several teeth extracted. Eddie fell into a coma and was taken to St. Francis Hospital, where he died two days later without regaining consciousness. He was thirty-nine. His obituary noted that he had once been a stock trader with Paine Webber but mentioned no recent employment.
The Hartford Courant
emphasized two facts about the deceased. One was his distinguished ancestry as a grandson of the Reverend Dr. Edwin Pond Parker, pastor of the South Congregational Church and friend of Mark Twain. The other was his first marriage to Dorothy Parker, the “well-known poet.”

On the day the divorce became final, Dorothy spent the evening with John Garrett at Jack and Charlie’s speakeasy, where later they were joined by Heywood Broun and writer Mildred Gilman, at that time Broun’s secretary and assistant. Gilman recalls that Dorothy went to pieces.

Even though she hadn’t seen Eddie Parker for years, and never said a good word about him, this was a terrible time for her. She carried on and kept running off to the ladies room to cry, and the men kept sending me after her because she had this tendency toward committing suicide, and she also had a habit of giving all her money to the ladies-room attendant. After this happened three or four times, I was getting bored stiff. Finally, John rose in all his Wall Street finery and announced emphatically that
he
had to go to the gentleman’s room, to which Dorothy muttered, “He really has to use the telephone but he doesn’t want to admit it.”

That spring she tried to temper her drinking with highballs that were just little ones, “awfully weak; just cambric Scotch,” and talked about needing more dogs. May marked the publication of
Sunset Gun
, her second volume of verse. Boni and Liveright did a hefty first printing of ten thousand copies, along with a fancy numbered and autographed special edition of 250 copies that was priced at $7.50. Dorothy switched titles at the last moment from the rather cheerful
Songs for the Nearest Harmonica
to the darker
Sunset Gun,
a reference to the cannon that is traditionally fired at the end of the day when the flag is lowered. Reviews were, if anything, even more enthusiastic than for
Enough Rope
. In the
Saturday Review
, Bill Benét repeated the question some people were asking: “Is it as good as
Enough Rope
?” Benét emphatically believed it was and went on to call
Sunset Gun
“a moth-gray cloak of demureness hiding spangled ribaldry, a razor-keen intellect mocking a head dark with desperation.” As for its author, “Long may she wave!”

In
Sunset Gun
Dorothy included a concise poem written for
The New Yorker
before she met John Garrett, which she called “Three-Volume Novel,” although in the collection she downgraded it to “Two-Volume Novel”:

The sun’s gone dim, and
The moon’s turned black;
For I loved him, and
He didn’t love back.

She dedicated
Sunset Gun
to John, but the situation remained as unsatisfactory as ever. She was not prepared to send him packing, nor could she accept him as he was. Her emotional dependence on him was contrasted by the autonomy she exhibited in other areas of her life. She left the Algonquin, where Round Table lunches had become less frequent, and moved into a furnished flat on East Fifty-fourth Street, off Fifth Avenue, two flights above a piano store. She paid seventy-five dollars a month for a living room, a tiny bedroom, and a kitchenette with all the usual useless conveniences. Only the ice box interested her, because the White Rock needed to be chilled.

Dorothy’s nightly cocktail parties took place as always at her new apartment. One evening, when a large crowd had assembled, Mildred Gilman happened to enter Dorothy’s bedroom to get to the bathroom at about the same time as Robert Benchley went in to make a telephone call. Dorothy noticed and later saw them coming out of the bedroom together. Jumping to conclusions and furious at Mildred, whom she supposed to have lured Benchley into the room, she waited until Mildred had left before informing Heywood Broun that his secretary was a slut. When this got back to Gilman, a divorcee with a small son, she was so upset that she asked Benchley to tell Heywood the truth. She also wondered why Dorothy would have fabricated such a mean story. Benchley, too, found it baffling.

She is quite given to telling of assaults on John by various ladies (I have never heard you included in the list, but have heard only part of the list) but this [is] the first time that I have ever been made the hero. It sounds like one of Dottie’s vivid word-pictures to illustrate my helplessness in the clutches of any attractive woman.... Incidentally, you don’t suppose for one minute that, if I had any reason to believe that you had designs on my person, you would have left that room inviolate, do you?

Allen Saalburg remembered Dorothy as “half-soused a good deal of the time, and that’s when her worst qualities came out.” A certain amount of the respect she commanded was rooted in “very strong fear. People were afraid of being jumped on from behind.”

Dorothy had experienced abdominal pain in the winter and wondered if she might have appendicitis, but the discomfort was slight. Instead of reporting it to Dr. Barach, she bought a book about appendicitis and self-diagnosed the symptoms as a fancy hangover, “just the effects of that new Scotch of mine which, friends tell me, must have been specially made by the Borgias.” One Monday afternoon toward the end of May, she suddenly developed severe pain and began running a temperature. This time she did send for Barach, who diagnosed acute appendicitis and sent her to Presbyterian Hospital, where she was operated on the same evening.

When Aleck Woollcott came to visit,

I found her hard at work. Because of posterity and her creditors, I was loath to intrude, but she, being entranced at any interruption, greeted me from her cot of pain, waved me to a chair, offered me a cigarette, and rang a bell. I wondered if this could possibly be for drinks. “No,” she said sadly, “it is supposed to fetch the night nurse, so I ring it whenever I want an hour of uninterrupted privacy.”

She gave her address as Bedpan Alley and requested a typewriter, insisting that the size of the hospital bill made it necessary for her to write her way out of the place. Ignoring the fact that she had two best-selling books in print—and loath to shell out the fruits of her success to Presbyterian Hospital—she tried to think of someone who might want to underwrite an extravagance like an appendectomy. Bea Stewart assumed the hospital expenses would not be a problem, since they had rich friends who would be pleased to help out.

“No rich people,” Dorothy cautioned. Dorothy never took money from people she disliked.

Dorothy agreed that John Gilbert would be the logical candidate to approach. Although he earned ten thousand dollars a week in Hollywood, he did not qualify as “rich people” by her definition. Gilbert responded to Bea’s telegram by promptly wiring the money, which she asked the telegraph office to pay out in one-dollar bills. Stuffing the cash into a paper bag, she marched into Dorothy’s room and tore open the bag to let the green leaves blow around like a hurricane in a cabbage patch. The nurses failed to find this amusing.

“Is this insanity?” one of them asked sourly and stalked out.

“It’s a form of it,” Bea replied.

After three weeks at Presbyterian, Dorothy faced a month’s convalescence at home. She was miserably bored. Before long she was wishing that she owned an electric train. “Hell, while I’m up, I wish I had a couple of professional hockey teams.” To kill time she read fiction, which reminded her of her own failures in that genre. Despite everything, her ambition still was to write a novel. Real writers, in her eyes, seldom limited themselves to short fiction. More than ever, she felt a need to prove herself a real writer. Short-story collections never sold well because literature was measured by the yard and people wanted their money’s worth. She began to work on a story that would not be quite long enough to qualify as a novella, but was two or three times the length of anything she had attempted so far. It was possibly the finest story she ever wrote. To read it is to envisage her laying down a sentence, laboriously shaping it until it seemed simple, then going on to the next sentence and doing likewise, so carefully crafted is this story.