Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (50 page)

Nineteen forty-seven, the year that this memo was compiled, was a dangerous time for those holding leftist beliefs. Membership in a list of supposedly subversive organizations drawn up by the Attorney General’s office branded people disloyal and therefore unemployable. In Hollywood, the film industry quaked when Congressman J. Parnell Thomas served forty-five actors, writers, and directors with subpoenas commanding their presence before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Of this number, nineteen unfriendly witnesses—quickly labeled the Hollywood Nineteen—refused to cooperate. Ten who were eventually cited for contempt of Congress served prison terms.

Lillian Hellman provided an account of Dorothy’s experience with HUAC in her memoirs. She claimed that when the subpoena arrived, she offered to accompany her to the hearing. Dorothy looked puzzled and asked “Why, Lilly?” Hellman interpreted this to mean that she regarded the ruling classes as nothing more than people who had more money than she did. Hellman went on to commend Dorothy’s hauteur before the Committee, as if she were telling them, “Yes, dear, it’s true that I’m here to observe you, but I do not like you and will, of course, say and write exactly that.”

As with so many of Lillian Hellman’s memories, this simply was not true. Dorothy was not among those who received a pink slip in 1947, nor was she summoned as a witness in the HUAC hearings during the early fifties, because the government must have known that it had a weak case. Dorothy herself made two rather emphatic statements on the subject. In 1937, she wrote that she belonged to no political party, her only group affiliation having been with “that not especially brave little band that hid its nakedness of heart and mind under the out-of-date garment of a sense of humor.” Fourteen years later, she denied having ever been a Party member, although it is easy to understand that the circumstances under which she made the statement might have warranted the stretching of the truth.

In 1937, after the Communist Party decided to form alliances with nonrevolutionary groups like the Democratic party, Hollywood began to resemble a tropical rain forest that teemed with lush varieties of political ideologies and activities. In this steamy atmosphere of the Popular Front, the distinctions between Communism and home-grown American liberalism tended to blur.

An interesting paradox began to develop in the C.P. On the one hand, it was a fairly accessible organization—all that was required to obtain information was listening. Even the indifferent—and Dorothy was far from indifferent—had difficulty avoiding both the C.P. gospel and C.P. members. All over town they could be encountered at Chasen’s or Screen Writers Guild meetings or the studio commissaries.

At the same time, an air of secrecy had grown up around the Hollywood C.P. Chiefly, this seems to have been a result of the Party’s doctrine of expediency—the notion that there was little to gain if they frightened the people they wanted to influence by waving radical ideas under their noses. As C.P. functionaries have since explained, it was standard procedure for Party members active in politics or union organizing, particularly in the Screen Writers Guild, to avoid open participaton in Party work. Contributing to the secrecy was the fact that the Hollywood C.P. did not issue membership cards. Ring Lardner, Jr., later stated that the organizatonal secretary probably kept a list of members in order to record dues payments, but most likely even that used pseudonyms or partial names. Lardner and Dalton Trumbo ridiculed the C.P. cards reading “Ring L.” and “Dalt T.” that HUAC produced at the 1947 hearings of the Hollywood Ten.

The fact that some found the melodrama of belonging to a secret society appealing does not seem remarkable in an industry whose product was fantasy. Ring Lardner recalled that during telephone conversations he made from his MGM office, he referred to Party meetings as poker games. Meetings were generally sheltered events held in private homes, where people sat around with drinks in their hands, so that the gathering would look like a cocktail party if an outsider happened to barge in. One writer stashed his library of Marxist literature in a secret compartment of his bar. Others concealed their political activities from wives or lovers. Lillian Hellman wrote that, despite her attendance at three or four C.P. gatherings with Dashiell Hammett, with whom she was living at the time, he never divulged whether or not he was a member. She suspected that he joined in 1937 or 1938, but she never asked “and if I had asked would not have been answered,” a state of affairs that she attributed to the peculiar nature of their relationship.

The main person to connect Dorothy with being a secret member of the Party was Martin Berkeley, an ex-Communist screenwriter
(My Friend Flicka)
who appeared as a cooperative witness before HUAC in 1951 and managed to win a good deal of publicity by naming 158 individuals whom he claimed had been C.P. members in the thirties. Berkeley testified that he knew exactly when—mid-June 1937—the Hollywood section of the Party had been organized because it had taken place at his home, since his place had a big living room and ample parking facilities. Among those who showed up, he said, were five prominent writers: Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, Donald Ogden Stewart, Lillian Hellman, and Dashiell Hammett. He went on to say that after the meeting at his house he never saw any of those five writers again. Curious, he asked his Party superior about their whereabouts and was told they had been assigned to a group known as “party members at large,” that he had seen the last of them as far as organizational meetings were concerned. A member at large, Berkeley explained to the Committee, meant that “you are pretty important and you don’t want to be exposed.” It was his guess that the important writers had ended up meeting secretly with Party functionaries like John Howard Lawson or V. J. Jerome to receive instructions but otherwise had no contact, for their own protection as well as for that of the Party.

Accusations such as Berkeley’s destroyed Dorothy’s career during the fifties. Unable to find work as a screenwriter, she paid dearly for her transgressions, real or invented, but she never called attention to her plight, never singled herself out as exceptional or in any way worthy of admiration, in contrast to Lillian Hellman who felt compelled to exalt her behavior. Dorothy declined to speak of her politics, past or present. When an interviewer once tried to question her about the political consciousness in Hollywood during the 1930s, she affected not to understand the question. “I haven’t the faintest idea about the politics of Hollywood, and you make me laugh when you speak of them.”

Living in Pennsylvania and working in California meant the expense of supporting two establishments, but the money continued to roll in. In May 1937, Dorothy and Alan signed a five-year contract with Samuel Goldwyn at a combined weekly salary of fifty-two hundred dollars. The new contract was respectfully reported by the press, for that amount was remarkable by anyone’s standards and close to the upper limit of salaries being paid to screenwriters. Returning to Hollywood on June 7, they moved into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where Alan abruptly—and inexplicably—began to institute economies. Contending that the hotel was expensive and noisy, he rented a house in Beverly Hills and hired a single servant. This about-face toward spartan living failed to please him either. He described their new quarters at 710 North Linden Drive as “hideous.”

At first they liked the studio. As the name plates on the doors of the Writers’ Building attested, Sam Goldwyn made a practice of hiring top-quality writers. In the office next to theirs was their friend Lillian Hellman.

The picture that Dorothy and Alan had been signed to work on was called
The Cowboy and the Lady
, a romantic comedy intended for Merle Oberon and Gary Cooper. It had already run through several titles and an equal number of writers, including Anita Loos and John Emerson, but the Campbells were entrusted with writing the final draft. They soon discovered that while Goldwyn wanted only the most important writers, his disregard for their work was no different than other Hollywood producers’. When the new script failed to satisfy him, they were yanked off the project and reassigned to
The Goldwyn Follies,
a musical blockbuster that was to make use of beautiful women, outstanding comics, Gershwin music and lyrics, and George Balanchine dances. All that it lacked was a decent script. Once again a band of writers had preceded Dorothy and Alan, who, remembering their fifty-two hundred a week, struggled to devise still another version. While Goldwyn seemed pleased, he thought it could use a fresher finish and eventually showed their draft to Ben Hecht, who talked him out of it and into a completely new one written by himself. When
The Goldwyn Follies
did poorly, Dorothy and Alan cackled with glee. Hecht had claimed the sole writing credit for himself.

Finally, Goldwyn shifted them to another project that had been worked over by practically every writer on the lot. You Can Be Beautiful was supposed to tell the story of an entrepreneur like Elizabeth Arden or Helena Rubenstein, a woman who revolutionizes the beauty business. For the movies, she had to be beautiful and happy. When Dorothy was asked for a new twist, she proposed making the heroine plain as a pancake, a contented duckling who is transformed into an unhappy beauty. Garson Kanin remembered Goldwyn’s reaction:

“God damn
it, Dottie!” he thundered. “You and your God damn sophisticated jokes. You’re a great writer. You’re a great poet.” He paused, frowning in an effort to recall something. He quoted, “ ‘Men never make a pass at girls wearing eyeglasses.’ That’s a great poem and you wrote it. You’re a great wit. You’re a great woman, but you haven’t got a great audience and you know why? Because you don’t want to give people what they want.”

Dorothy’s wide, innocent face looked up at him. “But Mr. Goldwyn,” she said softly, “people don’t know what they want until you give it to them.”

“You see that?” said Goldwyn to the world. “You just did it
again
. Wisecracks. I told you there’s no money in wisecracks. People want a happy ending.”

Dottie rose. “I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn,” she said, “but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.”

She left the room.

Goldwyn surveyed those of us who remained. “Does anybody in here know what the hell that woman was talking about?”

No doubt they did but nobody dared try to explain it.

Back in the summer of 1936, the Screen Writers Guild had disbanded, but it looked as if it was about to rise phoenix-like from its ashes. Dorothy threw herself wholeheartedly into making sure it did. Even though the studios believed the Guild had died, a handful of people had kept it alive for the past year by meetings at private homes, Dorothy and Alan’s among them. An unpublished poem Dorothy wrote during the days of clandestine organizing was titled “The Passionate Screen Writer To His Love.” Its opening stanza provoked grins among screenwriters in 1937 and Marc Connelly carefully preserved it among his papers:

Oh come, my love, and join with me
The oldest infant industry.
Come seek the bourne of palm and pearl,
The lovely land of Boy-Meets-Girl,
Come grace this lotus-laden shore,
This Isle of Do-What’s-Done-Before.
Come, curb the new, and watch the old win,
Out where the streets are paved with Goldwyn.

The Guild had been waiting for a favorable ruling by the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the Wagner Act. When this happened on April 12, the Guild lost no time in drafting a petition for a National Labor Relations Board hearing. The studios had insisted all along that writers were artists, therefore ineligible to unionize. The hearing would be a test case to see whether or not writers could be considered labor.

Less than two weeks after Dorothy’s return to Hollywood, the Guild held its first open meeting at the Hollywood Athletic Club. More than four hundred writers showed up. Despite Red-baiting charges that the Communists were responsible for reforming the Guild, the slate of officers and board members elected that evening demonstrated a nice balance between conservatives, liberal Democrats, and those known to be left-wingers. Dorothy was elected to the board.

The union organizing went on for more than a year until the National Labor Relations Board ruled in June 1938 that screenwriters did indeed qualify as workers under the Wagner Act. A certification election held that same month allowed them to choose either the Screen Writers Guild or the more conservative Screen Playwrights as their representative. The Screen Writers Guild won by a vote of more than four to one.

Though the Guild did not win its first contract until 1941, nine years after the organizing had begun, the battle had been won. Dorothy thought that “the bravest, proudest word in all the dictionaries” was organize, but she was realistic enough to believe “that if a screenwriter had his name across the Capital Theatre in red, white, and blue letters fifty feet tall, he’d still be anonymous.”

Chapter 14

BAD FIGHTS