Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (52 page)

On October 11, she and Alan flew to Paris, which seemed like another planet—shops shocked the eye with creamy yellow butter and Brie, and charcuteries offered beefsteaks adorned with sprigs of parsley. Practically the first person they ran into was Lillian Hellman. After giving her an excited account of their trip, it was natural for them to encourage her to go. They offered advice about what to take and who to see. So persuasive were they that Hellman departed for Spain only a few days later. Describing her travels in An Unfinished Woman, Hellman devoted some thirty pages to her role in the Spanish war, including the time her foray into the street during an air raid elicited a compliment from Hemingway: “So you have cojones after all.”

Despite her
cojones,
Hellman failed to mention that Dorothy and Alan had preceded her to Spain. Instead, she emphasized Dorothy’s rich friends. In Hellman’s version, Alan never got to play any role except a
cojones-less
swish. Martha Gellhorn, comparing Hellman’s visit to Dorothy’s, remembered that she and her friends pooled their canned goods to cook a decent dinner for Hellman, only to find that she arrived empty-handed. “Miss H. brought nothing but herself and unlike Dottie she was not funny,” she wrote and called the reunion “a dull, grumpy dinner.”

After her experiences in Spain, living on the farm made her feel restless. She wrote an article about the war for
New Masses
and began the first of several short stories. She gave newspaper interviews saying that she wished to do something for the American hospitals in Spain and declared that the Loyalist government “has to win,” even though she secretly believed its cause was hopeless. “You knew darn well it was going to happen, even when you were there.” At parties, she tried to contain her anger against people who asked, “Why did you want to go all the way over and get into that messy thing for? A person like you!”

In Pipersville, the enemy was “Mrs. Camp Bell,” as she had begun calling her mother-in-law. Horte had no desire to hear about Spain and pointedly ignored that part of their trip. Dorothy was apoplectic. She imagined Horte lounging under a magnolia tree and waving a fan while Alan was being “bombed and shelled and machine-gunned and sniped at,” and decided that her mother-in-law didn’t give a damn about her son.

“Well,” Horte said to Dorothy, “that old war wasn’t goin’ on while you were there, was it?”

“Oh, no, they stopped the war while your son was there.”

“Well, I tho’t so,” Horte replied.

A few days after her return, Dorothy received a letter from the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, a group that the House Un-American Activities Committee later said was a Communist front organization. Sheelagh Kennedy knew about Dorothy’s trip and thought she might be interested in the women’s subcommittee they were organizing to undertake a campaign on behalf of Spanish children. The nonpolitical group would be a purely humanitarian effort to help refugee children facing another winter of starvation. She wondered if Dorothy might want to offer aid or advice. Dorothy, still shaken by memories of the children, replied promptly.

Dear Miss Kennedy,

I want with all my heart to do anything I can in the campaign to aid Spanish children.

I am living here in the country, but it is a very little way from New York, and I could come in any time you might want me.

Sincerely yours,
Dorothy Parker

The voluminous files of this group, preserved in the Rare Book and Manuscript collection at Columbia University, are full of solicitation letters to women of means, who were likely prospects for cash donations, tickets to cocktail parties, or a loan of their homes for fund-raising parties. While many letters were mailed out, acceptances were predictably few. Sheelagh Kennedy must have been overjoyed to hear from Dorothy. She promptly telegraphed Fox House to thank Dorothy for the letter and to invite her to a meeting the very next day. Within two weeks, Dorothy had become national chairman.

In her honor, Sheelagh Kennedy arranged a luncheon that drew an enthusiastic crowd of notables, including the Spanish ambassador. Dorothy, in her address to the guests, discovered that public speaking terrified her. She managed to get a laugh by saying that she had been “scared green” in Spain, but she said she believed herself to be the only person in the country to feel frightened. She went on to praise the courage of the Spanish people. In months to come, Kennedy scheduled speaking dates for her, even though she continued to suffer intense nervousness. She believed her speeches were banal and repetitious.

But the people at the women’s division thought she was wonderful, that how she sounded made little difference when her talks raised so much money for Spain.

From the first, it was clear that volunteer work was going to make heavy demands on her time, a good deal more than she had bargained for. Her holidays were taken up by fund-raising parties. She and Alan spent New Year’s Eve in the Village at a charity ball for Spain because Dorothy had promised to be there. Two weeks later, they were back in the Hollywood rat race, this time working at MGM. Dorothy promptly christened their new employer Metro-Goldwyn-Merde.

When Sid and Laura Perelman gave up a job at MGM because Laura was pregnant, the Campbells were hired as their replacement. The picture was a Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald musical, an adaptation of Victor Herbert’s operetta Sweethearts. MGM offered Dorothy and Alan two thousand dollars a week, which was double the Perelmans’ joint salary, but a comedown from their last ill-fated job working for Sam Goldwyn. Even though their agent, Zeppo Marx, had managed to sweeten the deal by persuading MGM to pay the cost of their transportation from the East Coast, Dorothy did not feel the least bit appreciative.

With relish, the Perelmans proceeded to brief them on producer Hunt Stromberg’s special eccentricities and the difficulties they might expect to encounter in his unit. Stromberg insisted that everyone attend a story conference so that he personally could bring his new writing team up to date.

On Monday, January 17, 1938, Dorothy, Alan, and Sid, who remained on the payroll, presented themselves at Stromberg’s office. Perelman was curious to see at close range how his friends would function in “an industrial setting,” far from Bucks County’s parlors. Dorothy sank into the shadows of a deep armchair, put on her glasses, and brought forth her knitting from a reticule. Alan revealed himself to be “the drive train of the duo, toothy, voluble, bubbling with suggestions, charming the birds out of the trees,” while Dorothy subtracted herself from the meeting, turning down her attention to a level where she appeared to be in need of oxygen. Hunt Stromberg, zigzagging back and forth with his shoelaces untied and dragging, rambled on. He puffed on one or another of his collection of pipes and had a disquieting habit of flinging around wooden matches, some of them still lit, with little regard for ash trays. Perelman pondered the article that Dorothy was knitting. Since it was gray and measured about seven feet in length, he decided it must be a carpet, most likely a staircase runner. Every now and then Stromberg interrupted his discourse to stop at Dorothy’s chair.

“I’d say we were making pretty good progress, eh, Dorothy?”

Dorothy’s spectacles kept sliding down her nose. Looking up uncertainly, she made an attempt to return from outer space. “Oh, I do think it’s altogether marvelous, don’t you?” This slid from her lips in a breathless rush, after which she submerged into a coma once more.

Perelman recalled how Stromberg, still in full flow, finally managed to set a fire under Dorothy. It happened on the third day of the conference when Perelman, surreally bored, was not fully awake. He became conscious of Stromberg’s trailing shoelaces and his pipe, then spied an odd cloud that was beginning to wreathe Dorothy’s head, almost a nimbus halo. It dawned on Perelman that it must be smoke when he heard Alan’s voice.

“Dottie!” Alan screamed. “You’re on fire.”

But Perelman could see that

it was just kapok, the stuffing in her chair that was touched off by one of Stromberg’s matches, and it smoked and smoldered a bit after we yanked her out and rolled her on the floor. People ran in, throwing Lily Cups of water on the cushions, but the damage was piffling. The damage to the chair, that is—the damage wrought by
Sweethearts
is still being dealt with by therapists, I presume.

Sweethearts
worked out remarkably well for the Campbell bank account, because they became mired in a script that failed to suit Stromberg and the job dragged on until July. In a letter to Harold Guinzburg’s secretary, Alan complained about their difficulties. After many weeks of work, he said, “We have no story.” He consoled himself by purchasing “a wonderful sofa ... at bargain prices” from friends who were leaving town. Sheelagh Kennedy enriched the U.S. Post Office and Western Union with requests that Dorothy sponsor tea dances, cocktail parties, musicales, and champagne dinner dances, all of them taking place in New York. There was a serious milk shortage, and the Women’s Division felt sure it could collect a thousand dollars if Dorothy appeared. Usually Dorothy sent regrets, but she did fly in for a weekend in March. She stayed at the Waldorf Towers and spoke at a meeting to raise money for powdered milk and ambulances. As always, she disliked her performance and afterward apologized to Kennedy for “my bad speech and hurried exit.” In May, during a Newspaper Guild strike in Los Angeles, she marched in a picket line outside the
Hollywood Citizen-News.

During the years 1938—1941, their joint salary stabilized at two thousand dollars a week. Among the films they worked on were
Crime Takes a Holiday
and
Flight
into Nowhere
(both Columbia Pictures),
Trade Winds
(United Artists), and
Weekend for Three
(RKO). Several other films were never produced. In 1941, when Sam Goldwyn bought the film rights to Lillian Hellman’s successful Broadway drama Watch on the Rhine, Hellman asked several friends to write additional dialogue, including Dorothy and Alan and her former husband, Arthur Kober. Kober later claimed that their contribution was so insignificant that having their names on the picture was absurd but Alan Campbell was “a little guy who needed the credit,” and therefore all three names were used.

Alan’s reputation as a “little guy” persisted. Many in the industry chose to regard him as an illegitimate writer riding on his famous wife’s coattails. The truth was otherwise. Alan was beginning to get a few assignments on his own. Budd Schulberg believed that he was badly maligned, that Dorothy could not have held a job without him. “Her work habits were terrible, but Alan was extremely disciplined. He dragged her along. At United Artists, I watched how they worked. Alan would say, ‘We start at nine A.M.’—and they would start. After he’d blocked out a scene, he’d tell her, ‘We need a real zinger here,’ and then Dottie would come up with lines to improve his dialogue. In his own right he was a really good screenwriter, maybe because he’d once been an actor, but nobody gave him credit.”

It was fortunate that Alan had plenty of patience, because Dorothy could be a surly collaborator. While they were writing Sweethearts at MGM, the neighboring office was occupied by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. When the door was open, they could hear Dorothy and Alan composing dialogue out loud.

“And then what does he say?” Alan asked.

Dorothy’s answer was soft but audible. “Shit.”

“Please don’t use that word,” Alan muttered. Turning back to his typewriter, he continued, “All right—and then what does she say?”

“Shit.”

“Don’t use that
word!
”

According to Albert Hackett, Alan did all the typing. “He also did all the work. He pushed Dottie.” Often she would be in a complaining, critical mood. She spoke disdainfully about the money they earned, saying that they spent every penny—their paychecks melted like ice cubes. People in Hollywood got on her nerves too. At a party, she listened politely as British actor Herbert Marshall made repeated references to his busy “shedule.” When she could stand it no longer, she burst out, “I think you’re full of skit.”

Despite her complaints, she never seriously suggested they leave Hollywood.

You could have the most remarkable house. You could have a pool, if you wished. I don’t swim. My goodness, you could have so many things. And you said to yourself while you were there, “For heaven’s sake, I might as well live as good as I can while I have to be here.”

Occasionally she enjoyed a wonderful laugh, as when a producer once asked her, “Now listen—are we extracting the milk of the theme?” Since extraction was tough work, she never belittled the sweat that went into screen writing. To an interviewer who suggested the work was demeaning, she quickly protested, “No, it wasn’t dreadful. It was a terrible bore. It was a strenuous bore. You sat there and you sat there and you sat there. That’s what it was.”

After work, Alan drove them to the house they had purchased in the provinces, way out in Coldwater Canyon. She had been charmed by the place at first sight, because its authentic bar had once been part of an old San Francisco saloon. It was a comfortable small house with a large garden, perched on the side of a hill. She made no objection to the pink satin drapes and cabbage rose wallpaper Alan installed in the living room. They lived there off and on for two years. One day, she looked out the window and told Alan they would have to move immediately because there was “a suicide light” rippling on the hill behind the house.

They hastened back to the Garden of Allah, where the light did not make her think that it might be refreshing to be dead.

A newspaper reporter asked her if she would care to say a few words about her life.

By all means. It was “terrible.”