Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (35 page)

It can be described as a parable of a woman who loses her way, condemned to live and wander. Hazel Morse is a wholesale dress model, good sport, wife, ex-wife, swell drinker, animal lover, unsuccessful suicide, and big blonde. The story readily suggests Dorothy and presents a fictionalized account of some bad things that had happened to her. “Big Blonde” is perhaps the most intensely autobiographical of all her fiction. Certainly, it was no accident that she opens the story in the garment industry, where Hazel has been employed as a model for many years and where she has perfected her good-sport role with dress buyers from Des Moines and Houston. Like her heroine, Dorothy had her own origins in the garment business; although Seventh Avenue was a world she despised, it was as familiar to her as breathing.

After tinkering with the story off and on for the rest of the year, she allowed Seward Collins to publish it in
The Bookman
as a favor, because she might have placed it in a more distinguished magazine. When “Big Blonde” appeared in February 1929, it brought her unanimous praise. F.P.A.’s reaction in The Conning Tower typified the enthusiasm:

... So had a beaker of milk with O. Hering the architect, and so home and read a tayle of Dorothy Parker’s in the February Bookman, called “Big Blonde,” the best short story I have read in so long a time that I cannot say. I would nominate that lady for a membership in the Dudless Writers’ Club, a sacred society, whose only other member I can think of at this moment is A. E. Housman.

Her friends, naturally, loved “Big Blonde.” So did a great many others, however. The prestigious O. Henry competition selected it as the best short story of 1929.

The publication of “Big Blonde” marked a leap forward in her literary reputation. It also sealed the end of her relationship with Collins, who, in due course, committed professional suicide. He and his literary magazine continued to win respect for another two or three years before taking a nose dive when he began publishing political ideas that seemed to parallel Mussolini’s. It was whispered that he had become a fascist. In addition to his admiration for the Nazis, his fascination with psychic research and his claims to be receiving messages from other worlds did not reassure people either. In 1952, Edmund Wilson informed her that Sewie had died.

“I don’t see what else he could do,” she said, as if he had killed himself. In her eyes he had, long ago.

Technological progress, aside from the Lindbergh flight, left Dorothy cold. She never learned to drive and refused to purchase a radio, obstinately declaring “there is no force great enough to make me,” and she found movies boring. A motion picture theater was “an enlarged and magnificently decorated lethal chamber to me.” All the same, she began to revise some of those judgments slightly when Benchley filmed
The Treasurer’s Report
for the William Fox Studio and a few months later acted in a second short,
The Sex Life of the Polyp
, which were the first films to use sustained talking for more than a minute. Dorothy thought he was magnificent. She also enjoyed watching a filmed conversation with George Bernard Shaw, but the ear-splitting sound tracks of other talkies made her feel like shouting at the screen, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, shut up!”

Three months later, she was sitting in a Culver City office building, staring at palm trees. Later, she said need of money lured her to Hollywood. Not only did the deal seem too good to pass up, but film writing also looked like easy money. She remembered thinking, “Why, I could do that with one hand tied behind me and the other on Irving Thalberg’s pulse.” Thanks partly to Howard Dietz, MGM offered her a contract paying three hundred dollars a week for three months, which added up to a tidy little sum. The disturbing part of the deal was living three thousand miles from New York. Still, the film company wooed her with excessive flattery, praising her wit and talent and telling her how much they needed clever writers like herself. A telegram arrived from John Gilbert: I HEAR SWELL NEWS ABOUT YOUR HAVING GONE MOVIE THAT’S GRAND WHEN ARE YOU ARRIVING.

Before she left for California, she gave an interview to the Brooklyn Eagle in which she excused her defection. “It always takes more to live on than what you earn,” she said, adding that she was “always hampered by money.” She also stated that she abhorred movies, hoped the entire film industry would collapse, and predicted she would hate Hollywood because it was full of palms, which “are the ugliest vegetable God created.” After a week in Hollywood she realized that she really did hate the place, but by then it was too late.

Her first assignment was writing dialogue for a melodrama,
Madame X.
The job got off to a bad start when she glimpsed an MGM publicity release that referred to her as “the internationally known author of Too
Much Rope
, the popular novel.” She was further dismayed to meet Irving Thalberg, production head of MGM, and realize that he had no idea who she was or why she had been hired.

“Now let’s see,” he said to her. “What was it you wanted to do for us?”

Her office was located at the end of a hall. “It was a lovely office but the air was oppressive, and even though I opened the windows and opened the doors, it was still depressing.” Her desk had the unmistakable fragrance of an outhouse. After days of sniffing and holding her nose, she learned why. The previous occupant had been growing mushrooms in a bottom drawer by a correspondence course with liquid manure guaranteed to produce mushrooms in any climate on earth. Other writers seemed reluctant to visit her cubicle. She felt isolated. When a sign painter arrived to letter her name on the door, she felt like bribing him to print GENTLEMEN instead.

Everything she had heard about Hollywood turned out to be true. Living was ridiculously expensive. At first she stayed at the Ambassador Hotel in a ten-dollar room that she thought was worth three. After she received her first paycheck and could afford to move, she lived with screenwriter Arthur Caesar and his wife, who had a big house in Beverly Hills. The parties she attended were pompous affairs, full of old fogies who had to be in bed by ten-thirty. A newspaper reported that at one gathering, she let off steam by yelling, “Come on, you so-and-sos, get a little action on this.” California weather made her sleepy, the brilliant flowers smelled like rotten, old dollar bills, and she suspected the enormous vegetables had been grown in dirty trunks. On Thanksgiving Day, when it was too hot to wear a coat, she wished she were at home where it was cold and a turkey sat in the oven at her sister’s house.

She hoped that three months in Hollywood might cure her obsession with John Garrett, the curious sensation she had of honestly not knowing “where John leaves off and I begin.” Separation from her had not changed him. When she telephoned, he sometimes pretended they had a poor connection or claimed he couldn’t talk on account of having visitors. Nothing had changed.

There was no lack of friends with whom she could commiserate in Hollywood. Gerald Murphy was there with Sara and the children. Murphy, an expert on Early American spirituals, had been recruited by MGM as a music consultant to King Vidor on the all-black picture Hallelujah. The Murphys agreed that the town was unappealing, and so did Bunny Wilson, who was living in a beach cottage in Santa Barbara and writing a novel. In early December, when Benchley arrived to act in three Fox pictures, he also found that he hated Hollywood. They turned into marathon complainers. On December 17, Dorothy was shattered to learn that Elinor Wylie had died the previous evening of a stroke; even Benchley’s presence could not dent her grief. “Dottie is so low that she hardly speaks even to me,” he reported to Gertrude.

Two months passed. Through no fault of her own, she had not written a single word for
Madame X
because nobody instructed her what to write. Instead, she wrote dialogue for an untitled film (whose plot remained a secret too). When she had finished, she sent it to Irving Thalberg for approval. Eventually, the pages came back with a message from his secretary: “Mr. Thalberg said to tell you that you have to be careful in writing for the pictures. You always have to think of the Little Totties.” Dorothy was ready to explode.

“God,” she moaned, “and how I hate children!”

Given her frustration, it is not clear why she signed two more contracts in early January committing herself to work on
Five O’Clock Girl
and the Cecil B. DeMille film
Dynamite
.

For Dynamite, she was asked to write a song, even though the picture was not a musical. Since the success of
The Jazz Singer
, producers were insisting that even nonmusicals use a song for exploitation purposes. To Dorothy’s mind, the theme-song craze had got out of hand with such foolishness as “Varsity Girl, I’ll Cling to You,” for
Varsity Girl
, but she was determined to give MGM what she imagined might please, and she concocted a snappy lyric entitled, “Dynamite Man, I Love You,” which was swiftly pronounced unacceptable. At her wit’s end to know what they wanted, she made up her mind to ask DeMille himself what the picture was about, although getting in to see him was “like riding a camel through the eye of a needle.”

“Mr. DeMille, just tell me what this picture is about,” she croaked, fearful lest she waste a second of the producer’s precious time.

DeMille treated her to a lengthy saga about a socialite who, in order to gain an inheritance, needs a husband and makes up her mind to marry a man who has been accused and convicted of a murder, unjustly of course, and is awaiting the end in a prison cell, with time hanging heavy on his hands and nothing for solace but his guitar, not knowing a last-minute reprieve awaits him, the whole sorry goulash wanting nothing more than a catchy tune for the poor devil to sing. By the time he got to the end, Dorothy’s eyes had rolled upward and backward into her head.

“Mr. DeMille, the details of these pictures must be ... my goodness, it’s just staggering.”

DeMille said, “Ah, yes, zebras in
The King of Kings.
”

In her office, she began flipping through a Bible to find out why zebras should be in a film about the life of Christ. She wondered if she had heard wrong. Perhaps DeMille had said Hebrews.

Next time she saw DeMille, she said, “Mr. DeMille, what were you doing with zebras?”

He said, “Oh, the zebras. They were pulling the chariots of Mary Magdalene.” He paused. “Terrible, they kick so easily but their legs broke.”

“Of course,” Dorothy said. “I should have known that,” and tottered back to her office where she quickly wrote, with composer Jack King, a lovely ballad, “How Am I to Know?” When it was accepted, she informed Thalberg that she was going home. She demanded, and received, train fare back to New York. So eager was she to make her getaway that she left the home of Arthur Caesar without saying good-bye.

Back in New York, she allowed herself to be swept away by the enthusiasm of two men who had founded The Viking Press, Harold Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer, long-time admirers who convinced her that it would be a crime if she didn’t write a novel. Guinzburg was the type of intellectual whom Dorothy could respect, a sensitive, rather scholarly man who was exceptionally solid in his knowledge of literature. In contrast, “Georgie Opp” was extroverted—a snappy dresser, a bit of a smart aleck, a man who took pride in knowing everybody worth knowing and in cultivating those he didn’t. He loved women (as friends) and set about forthwith fawning over Dorothy, flattering her shamelessly. The upshot was that she agreed to produce a novel in time to head Viking’s spring 1930 list, an astonishing promise for someone who spent three or four months on a short story, but she was counting on it being possible if she went abroad again.

There seemed to be nothing holding her in New York, because her affair with John was over. She had a romantic’s view of broken love affairs. When an interviewer once asked if she thought it silly to kill oneself over unrequited love, she opened her eyes wide. “No,” she said. She took the same approach to the writing of novels. The solution for both was foreign travel.

When she learned that Muriel and Allen Saalburg were planning to sail in April, she made up her mind to go over with them.

Chapter 11

SONNETS IN SUICIDE, OR THE LIFE OF JOHN KNOX

1929-1932

During a brief stay in London, she bought a pugilistic, prizewinning Dandie Dinmont terrier named Timothy, who was fourteen months old and would have been the sweetest dog in the world if not for his habit of picking fights with almost every animal that crossed his path. Dorothy took Timothy to Paris, where she had not been at the Hotel Napoléon more than a few days before she began to feel sick.

Luckily, the Saalburgs knew of a physician, as it happened one of France’s most eminent surgeons, and they offered to accompany her to the examination. Afterward, the doctor came out to the reception room and gestured broadly to them with both arms to indicate the enlargement of the patient’s liver. Dorothy blamed the language difference for her difficulty in understanding the diagnosis and would mysteriously refer to her condition as “a dainty complaint—something the matter with my liver.” For six weeks she felt “sick and blue and lonely.” Work was out of the question, and drinking was strictly forbidden. Confined to her hotel room with only the Dandie Dinmont for company, she had visits from the Saalburgs and also a sick call from Ernest and Pauline Hemingway, who were living with their infant son near the Church of Saint-Sulpice and who were, she said, “something swell to me,” although later she admitted disliking Pauline.