Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (51 page)

1937-1941

Hollywood offered an uncommonly rich lode of raw material for satire. Although Dorothy loathed the place, she was unable to write anything about it. Instead, she merely looked on while friends published their observations in books for which she often composed laudatory reviews. Nathanael West finished
The Day of the Locust
, Budd Schulberg wrote
What Makes Sammy Run
?, and Sid Perelman reeled out sulfurous pieces ridiculing the movie titans who “forgather in their knotty-pine libraries beside the murmurous Pacific” while cigar smoke “wreathes their Renoirs.” Scott Fitzgerald, who was eventually inspired to write
The Last Tycoon
about the legendary Irving Thalberg, arrived in Hollywood during the summer of 1937. Seeing him again triggered Dorothy’s guilt about abandoning her fiction writing.

Dorothy’s former drinking companion looked pale and his hair had begun to thin, but he was unquestionably functional. He explained with great pride that he had been on the wagon for ten months. He moved into the Garden of Allah, where he lived chastely and consumed huge quantities of Coca-Cola. Scott was struggling to deal with serious troubles. Zelda had been diagnosed as incurable and would probably remain hospitalized for the rest of her life. Since he was barely earning a living lately, he was delighted when his agent secured him a six-month contract at MGM, where he was to be paid a thousand dollars a week.

Dorothy tried to head off his reproaches about her lack of productivity by taking the offensive and warning him that screen writing was exhausting work. When she spoke about the impossibility of serving two masters, Fitzgerald scoffed and retorted that he planned to get up early and write before reporting to MGM. He wrote to Max Perkins that Dorothy’s trouble was laziness. What he failed to realize was how much of her energy was directed into the Communist Party and the Screen Writers Guild. What he did know of these activities only made him suspicious. Having always found her basically self-concerned—a “spoiled” writer, he said—he did not believe that her conversion to Communism had any effect on her “supremely indifferent” attitude toward others.

Dorothy sought to lure Fitzgerald into radical politics by inviting him to social-cum-political functions. One of the memorable events of that summer was Ernest Hemingway’s arrival in July with a documentary film about the Spanish war. Dorothy made sure that Scott was invited to the private benefit screening at the home of Fredric March. The politically concerned element in the movie business turned out in force to see
The Spanish Earth
, a film that Hemingway had shot with Dutch director Joris Ivens and for which he also had written and recorded the narration. Frankly partisan in its support of the Spanish Republic, it demonstrated the anguish of the people and the way that war had affected their lives. After a screening at the White House for the Roosevelts, Hemingway was now hoping to obtain commercial distribution by one of the major studios as well as contributions for the purchase of ambulances. He promised that a donation of one thousand dollars would put an ambulance in action at the front in only four weeks. Dorothy, who had invested five hundred dollars in the film, was one of the few guests to buy an entire ambulance.

Lillian Hellman later wrote that after the screening Dorothy and Alan invited Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and a number of other friends to their house for a nightcap. According to Hellman, she accepted the offer of a lift from Fitzgerald, whom she described as acutely melancholy, perhaps even suffering delirium tremens, because he drove along at ten miles an hour with his hands trembling on the wheel. Pulling up at Dorothy’s house, he expressed fear about going in because he was on the wagon and terrified of Hemingway. “It’s a long story, Ernest and me,” Hellman reported him as saying. She replied that he mustn’t be afraid. They entered the house hand in hand at the precise moment that Hemingway, who was standing with his back to the door, decided to heave a highball glass against the stone fireplace. The sound of the smashing glass sent Fitzgerald into shell shock. Hellman shepherded him into the kitchen, where Dorothy and Alan were fixing drinks and Dashiell Hammett was getting drunk. Hellman recalls that her appeals to Hammett to help poor “Mr. Fitzgerald” proved useless and that Hammett remarked that Ernest had no gift for portraying women but only displayed them in his fiction in order to admire them, but she was unable to recall anything more about the evening. She and Scott never met again.

But this account is not true. Hellman herself wrote that she first met Hemingway in Paris a few months later, which is confirmed by the recollection of other individuals. Moreover, on the day of the screening, Hemingway and Fitzgerald had enjoyed a convivial luncheon together with Robert Benchley, who sent Gertrude a report of their reunion. There was no indication that this meeting was anything but warm and good-humored. The morning after The Spanish Earth was shown, Fitzgerald sent Hemingway a telegram of congratulations.

Not long after this, Dorothy’s proprietary interest in Scott’s political education came to an end. She invited him to a dinner dance sponsored by the Screen Writers Guild at the Coconut Grove nightclub. As organizer of the fund-raising dinner, she reserved a large table for her personal guests, including Scott, and danced often with him during the evening. When he was alone at the table, he noticed a pretty blonde nearby and began to cast admiring glances in her direction. This was Sheilah Graham, the reporter who had interviewed Dorothy about her tattoo, now an up-and-coming Hollywood gossip columnist. In Sheilah Graham, Scott would try to find a replacement for Zelda.

Dorothy and Alan made a precipitous and disgusted departure from Hollywood in early August. After two months of frustration, they learned that Sam Goldwyn was not planning to extend their option and that their ballyhooed five-year contract would yield only $52,000 instead of a projected $1.3 million. While they had not really counted on becoming millionaires, neither had they envisioned a mere ten weeks of employment for which they would receive not a single writing credit. They certainly did not expect to be cashiered without warning. Benchley told his wife, “Their jobs blew up.”

In a huff, Dorothy and Alan gave up the house on North Linden Drive and hurried back to Bucks County, where they planned to be farmers. A few days later, deciding that they deserved a holiday after the recent unpleasantness, they changed their minds and set off on a European vacation. Dorothy had not been abroad since 1932 and Alan had never been, so she was eager to conduct him around the sights. When they sailed for France aboard the
Normandie
on August 18, Lillian Hellman was with them.

On the boat they befriended Martha Gellhorn, a writer who was having an affair with Ernest Hemingway and who became his third wife after he divorced Pauline. The handsome, golden-haired Gellhorn had become involved with Hemingway while covering the war in Spain for
Collier’s
. They planned to meet in Paris before returning to Spain together. The Campbells hit it off immediately with Martha Gellhorn, even though her idea of shipboard fun was an energetic workout in the gymnasium. Dorothy would rather have eaten nails than exercise, but she admired Martha’s fitness and thought she was “truly fine—even leaving aside her looks and her spirit and her courage and her decency—though I can’t imagine why they should be shoved aside....” It turned out to be an unexpectedly enjoyable crossing, except for the pouting presence of Lillian Hellman who could not manage to conceal completely her jealousy of Gellhorn and later made catty remarks about “her well-tailored pants and good boots,” as if she were covering a war for
Vogue
.

Hellman, a difficult traveling companion under the best of circumstances, continued to dampen Dorothy and Alan’s gaiety once they reached Paris. She disliked Alan, whom she scorned as effete and affected. She attributed to Hemingway the remark that Alan treated his wife as if he were the manager of a champion prizefighter or movie star, a remark that may or may not be apocryphal, but one which perfectly reflected her own view of their marriage. Alan clearly worshiped Dorothy; he enjoyed ministering to her and actually sought opportunities to please her, traits conspicuously absent in Hellman’s own partner.

In Paris, crowded with visitors to the World Exhibition, they checked into the Hotel Meurice and plunged into a round of partying with Sara and Gerald Murphy, Alice Lee and Dick Myers, Janet Flanner, and Fernand Léger. One evening they had drinks with Hemingway. They also saw Ring Lardner’s son Jim, who wanted to enlist in the International Brigade and fight in Spain (where he was killed a few months later). Hellman tagged along, pretending to like the Murphys and trying to conceal her contempt for their manners and money. Alan tried to ignore Hellman’s animosity.

That summer in Paris, Dorothy was lionized everywhere she went. The rich and famous, Hellman recalled, “invited Dottie for dinners and country lunches and the tennis she didn’t play and the pools she didn’t swim in.” Although Hellman pretended to feel pleased when important people courted Dorothy, she was extremely jealous. Few had heard of her, nor did she have the personality or beauty to enchant them. She admitted that her own invitations were “second-class stuff compared to Dottie’s admirers.” In public, she expressed amusement at Dorothy’s excessively good manners, the haughtiness she would exhibit toward those who were trying to purchase her good will, but privately Hellman felt otherwise. For decades she suppressed her real feelings that the rich had indeed bought Dorothy whether she was willing to acknowledge it or not.

Hellman felt awkward around Dorothy’s wealthy friends. In
Pentimento,
she described them as an older generation who continued to move in a pre-Depression world that made her uncomfortable. After a few weeks of heavy-drinking nights and headachy mornings, she began to excuse herself from their compulsive partying. The Campbells saw less of her.

In her memoirs, Hellman wrote that her presence in Paris was connected with an invitation to attend a theatrical festival in Moscow. In 1981, when Martha Gellhorn tried to confirm that such an event had actually taken place, she was unsuccessful. Hellman, who liked to endow her smallest action with significance, never admitted simply to tagging along with Dorothy and Alan.

By mid-September, the weather had turned cold and rainy. One night Dorothy ran into Leland Stowe, a Pulitzer Prize—winning foreign correspondent who had just returned from Madrid. Traveling on a leave of absence from the
New York Herald Tribune
, Stowe could talk of nothing but the events he had seen in Spain. The Loyalist cause, he said later, was “the greatest, most meaningful cause in my life up to then.” When he asked Dorothy if she didn’t want to do something for the Spanish, she reared up defensively and replied that she didn’t wish to use their food when they had so little. Stowe advised her to fill up a suitcase with tins of French food, recommending that she donate the cans to the Spanish and dine on their wretched dishes herself.

Before this conversation with Stowe, Dorothy had not planned to visit Spain, unlike others she knew who practically regarded it as a sacred pilgrimage. One of Dashiell Hammett’s biographers mentions that his desire to visit the war that summer had been refused by the Party, who thought he could be of more use at home. Dorothy had not sought Party approval for the simple reason that she was not eager to risk having her head blown off. “I couldn’t imagine what it was like,” and when she tried to imagine going to war she felt “scared stiff.” Before she parted from Stowe, his words began to have an effect. She was “licked, and I went, and I did.” Alan hurried out to buy canned goods.

During their ten days in Spain, they spent part of the time in Madrid, where they looked up Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway. “Dottie Parker is here and very nice,” Gellhorn wrote to her mother, “and we had a marvelous dinner at [Herbert] Matthews.” The city had been under siege for nearly a year. Despite the evacuation, a million people still lived there, the trams and restaurants crowded, the shops doing business. Dorothy learned that there was little action on the front, but the city did not seem quiet to her. All day long she could hear the dull boom of the big guns and the irritable crackle of the smaller machine guns. She had to keep reminding herself that “gunners no longer need to shoot for practice.” Surprised to see that people were going about their business without hysteria, she calmed down and even went shopping like a tourist, purchasing a sheaf of war posters as souvenirs. A government employee acted as escort and interpreter because she was anxious to speak to people she met on the streets. When she asked a woman living with seven children in a bombed-out house why she had not left, she received a reasonable reply: She was waiting for her husband to come home from the front on furlough.

After a few days, Dorothy and Alan journeyed to Valencia, the capital of Republican Spain. Shortly after their arrival, the city suffered its worst air raid of the war. On a bright Sunday morning, five German planes unloaded sixty bombs on the area around the port. Afterward, Dorothy went to view the damage for herself. She never forgot the hills of rubble on which she noticed a broken doll and a dead kitten, the two small girls trying to push past guards to the house where their mother probably lay buried. That evening she and Alan visited one of the big popular cafés, where she stared mesmerized at a baby wearing a blue ribbon in her hair and where the waiter outdid himself to find a few pieces of grayish ice for the vermouths they ordered.

During their stay, Valencia was raided four times. She preferred night raids because she could anesthetize her fear to some extent by pretending it was a ballet with “scurrying figures and the great white drafts of the searchlights.” In the daytime she could not avoid seeing the terror on people’s faces. Most wrenching to watch were the children. She saw them on the streets with their mothers, visited the homeless in children’s refugee camps, observed them in schools drawing pictures of sailboats, and stared at the faces of those who were starving. “They don’t cry. Only you see their eyes. While you’re there and after you’re back, you see their eyes.”