Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (55 page)

The New Yorker
rejected “Clothe the Naked.” It was the first submission of Dorothy’s that Harold Ross had turned down since the magazine’s beginning, and he apparently had difficulty informing her of his decision. She was, after all, among the four or five writers who had, as Brendan Gill has noted, “helped to invent what the world came to call the ‘
New Yorker’
short story....” Unsure how to proceed, Ross talked the problem over with Harold Guinzburg, who advised waiting before either of them notified Dorothy. The blow would be softened if Guinzburg could tell her it had been sold to another magazine. When he submitted the story to
Harper’s
, the story was turned down again.

Meanwhile, a month had passed and Dorothy was getting worried. She fumed at Ross’s silence. It took the magazine three weeks to reject stories by mediocrities, she complained, and they might at least extend her the same courtesy. Her mood was not improved by the publication of a nasty profile in Cue magazine, which might have been libelous had it not been so accurate. Clearly, her so-called friends in New York had been blabbing because there were references to Ed Parker’s suicide attempts, John Gilbert’s sexual rejection of her (she was quoted as having said Gilbert was “a dear but he never wants to go to bed”), and it also recalled various humiliations at the hands of John McClain. Someone she knew had betrayed her.

Alan wrote secretly to Guinzburg and asked him to get in touch with Dorothy at once. By now, Guinzburg had been able to place “Clothe the Naked” with
Scribner’s
and was able to present Dorothy with pleasant news. From the beginning of their association, he had adopted a protective attitude. Over the years, he had grown adept at handling her ego like a delicate icon. Neglecting to mention the
Harper’s
rejection, he told her the story didn’t really belong in The New Yorker and insisted it was good business for her work to appear in a first-class literary magazine like
Scribner’s,
“in order to get away from the widely-held notion that you write only for the
New Yorker
, live at the Algonquin, and associate only with Woollcott and Ferber.” He apologized for
Scribner’s
“measly” two hundred and fifty dollars.

To Alan, Guinzburg wrote privately that “there is something wrong with the story, and I think I know what it is.” Although the weakness was obvious—indigestible propaganda cooked too little to become art—Guinzburg could not bring himself to name the flaw and lamely told Alan that the story’s ending was not strong enough to justify the buildup of anticipation throughout the piece. This is a curious conclusion since part of the story’s failure is that its violent conclusion seems too strong for everything that has preceded it.

After rejecting “Clothe the Naked,” Harold Ross grew increasingly suspicious of Dorothy as a writer. In some ways he had never trusted her and once referred to her, with an affectionate smile, as an alley cat. When James Thurber had been an editor at
The New Yorker,
Ross cautioned him to keep an eye on Dorothy because she inserted double meanings into her copy to embarrass him. He warned Thurber to query everything. Now he was on the lookout in case she was plotting to slip Red propaganda into his magazine. Their twenty-year friendship seemed in danger of deteriorating completely. Writing in
New Masses
in 1939, Dorothy described an editor who had turned down a story about the Spanish war because it favored the Republicans. “God damn it,” he had said to her, “why can’t you be funny again?” This nameless editor was Ross.

In 1927, Ross had made no objection to printing “Arrangement in Black and White,” a story that dealt with racial prejudice, but the reason he had done so was not to his credit. He “thought it was a scream,” Dorothy recalled. That, she assured herself, made no difference so long as it got published. Ten years later, “I tried to use just the same technique with pieces about Loyalist Spain that I wanted to have published. It didn’t work; that’s all. Fun is fun, and all that, but ‘Loyalist’ has become a four-letter word to editors.” After returning from Spain, she submitted several stories to
The New Yorker
, only to see them rejected. If Ross could not take Dorothy seriously as a foe of international Fascism, she refused to acknowledge his policy that the magazine should not take political stands.

Her pique at Ross ended when she sent him a spare report about some Loyalist soldiers on leave whom she and Alan had met in a Valencia café one Sunday evening. Dorothy had been drinking vermouth, the six soldiers ordered coffee, and she passed around a package of American cigarettes. Talking through an interpreter, the men told her they were farmers and the sons of farmers. “Their village,” she wrote, “was next to that one where the old men and the sick men and the women and children had gone, on a holiday, to the bullring; and the planes had come over and dropped bombs on the bullring, and the old men and the sick men and the women and the children were more than two hundred.” After the soldiers left the café, Dorothy was touched to learn that they had paid for her and Alan’s drinks. Although meeting the soldiers happened much as she described, she preferred to label “Soldiers of the Republic” as fiction. It was the best work she had done in years, an understated, powerful story that captures with tremendous clarity the life inside a crowded café where babies are still awake in the late evening and the death outside where bombs have fallen that morning in broad daylight. It transcends politics, which presumably was the reason Ross accepted it.

In its way, “Soldiers of the Republic” was as propagandist as “Clothe the Naked,” but it was superior artistically. The story was so widely praised after publication that Aleck Woollcott arranged for it to be reprinted as a pamphlet.

The Viking Press was eager to publish a third volume of her collected fiction, but there was little to collect. Since
After Such Pleasures
, she had written only three stories. When Harold Guinzburg suggested padding with stories rejected from previous collections and with book reviews, Dorothy balked. She disliked nearly all her old work and stubbornly insisted that she wished to reprint nothing except “Soldiers of the Republic” and “Clothe the Naked.”

In an apologetic telegram, she ruled out the possibility of another book and asked his forgiveness. She said her stay in Hollywood had lasted too long, confessed that she felt FRIGHTENED BY THE PASSING OF TIME, and begged for news of her New York friends because IT IS GOOD TO HEAR OF REAL PEOPLE DOING FINE THINGS.

Guinzburg was sympathetic. If an author wished to use her talent doing missionary work, that was her business and he did not condemn her. Her political commitment was no doubt healthy, he replied, but it was irrelevant to commercial book publishing. He scolded her for remaining in Hollywood and succumbing to “the seductions of agents, producers, and others.” As an incentive, he predicted that a new collection of stories would probably earn at least ten thousand dollars in royalties, perhaps forgetting that she and Alan earned almost that much in a month.

Guinzburg, used to getting his own way, was relentless in his coaxing. In the following months he outmaneuvered her.
Here Lies
was finally published in April 1939. Dedicated to Lillian Hellman, it included “Soldiers of the Republic” and “Clothe the Naked,” as well as a new story she wrote especially for the collection. “The Custard Heart” attacked her wealthy bourgeois women friends who had failed to develop a political consciousness. The remaining twenty-one stories had appeared in earlier books. Although readers found little that was fresh, the book was praised by the critics and sold well. What Dorothy herself admired most about Here
Lies
was its title. She had wanted to use it for
Not So Deep as a Well
, but the book of verse had already been printed and Guinzburg had no intention of discarding an entire printing. He had sent her a gentle telegram: WE WOULD HAVE TWENTY THOUSAND BOOKS TO GIVE TO SALVATION ARMY AND THINK OF EFFECT OF THAT.

One of the many chores that Alan gladly took care of was answering Dorothy’s mail, even her correspondence with intimate friends. He signed the personal letters rather sweetly as “alandotty.” Once the marriage began to be troubled, she felt uncomfortable as half an “alandotty.” The more she relied on Alan, the more bitterly she resented him and the stronger became her denials that she needed him. She knew that some people believed her pathetic in this respect and could not help noticing their condescending smiles, even though she asked for their smiles by launching violent tirades against her husband.

Bridling at the funny way Lillian Hellman looked at her, she told her off, although she did it gently. She once looked up from a book she was reading and said to Hellman, “The man said he didn’t want to see her again. That night she tried to climb into the transom of his hotel room and got stuck at the hips. I’ve never got stuck at the hips, Lily, and I want you to remember that.” Precisely the opposite was true.

Suddenly, both she and Alan were eager to prove they could manage without the other. She was writing again. Within a matter of months, she completed “Song of the Shirt, 1941” and “The Standard of Living,” two fine stories that also pleased Harold Ross. In the summer of 1941, she traveled to New York without Alan, a trip that Robert Benchley described as “a friendly divergence.” She kept bellyaching about Hollywood and all her friends back in New York, he wrote,

until Alan suggested she go East and shut up for a while. So she did, and now calls up every day to fight over the phone and hint about coming back, having probably fought with all her Eastern pals. Alan told her he thought she had better stay there a little longer, as he had several jobs of his own to finish before he could team up with her again.

All of a sudden Alan began to assert himself. His confidence shot up when he got a string of assignments from RKO. Most of the scripts on which he worked without Dorothy were not produced, but he was hardly to blame for it. The important achievement was his salary—$1,250 a week.

Dorothy remained away nearly two months. She spent much of the time with Sara and Gerald Murphy at East Hampton, Long Island, and hardly any at Fox House, which she seemed reluctant to visit alone. The farm was isolated and she was used to Alan’s being there, tidying and fussing. While it gave her great pleasure to talk about old times with her friends and to feel she was in the middle of things again, she missed her husband and returned to Beverly Hills in July. On her birthday, she thought nostalgically of Harold Ross and mailed him an affectionate note: “Ah, look, dear Harold—today’s my birthday—Dorothy.”

Not too long afterward, Alfred Hitchcock engaged her to add choice material to a script already written by Peter Viertel and Joan Harrison. Saboteur is about an aircraft factory worker who is wrongfully accused of sabotage and includes a cross-country chase to apprehend the true criminal. Dorothy wrote the dialogue for a troupe of circus freaks—a bearded woman and Siamese twins. She and Hitchcock appear in the film together, as a couple driving along the highway in a car just as Robert Cummings is manhandling Priscilla Lane. “My,” Dorothy remarks, “they must be terribly in love.”

The rest of 1941 passed less pleasantly. Dorothy, in a sour mood, taunted Alan for enjoying Hollywood. She called his values low, trashy, and bourgeois, his principles “debased.” Remorseful, she later admitted that she had gone too far and “behaved like a shit to him,” but added tartly, “I had much right on my side, but I used all the wrong things.” Again they teamed together to work on a baseball film about Lou Gehrig,
The Pride of the Yankees.
They were making good money at the Goldwyn studio when Dorothy spied an opportunity to yank the rug from under Alan’s feet by getting herself dismissed from the picture. Figuring that “alan” without “dotty” would certainly have to take up begging at Hollywood and Vine, she sat back and waited for Goldwyn to fire Alan. It was a prospect that gave her great satisfaction, but something went wrong.

The studio decided to keep Alan and replace Dorothy with Helen Deutsch, a short-story writer and former newspaper reporter who was working in pictures for the first time. Deutsch had no idea what had preceded her arrival. “I was too green to know the score, although somebody told me that Dorothy Parker had got stinking drunk and had been taken off the picture. All I knew was that Alan Campbell was there every day and Parker wasn’t.” Alan, she decided, was “a cute guy but creepy”—he shaved after he arrived at the office and spent hours leaning out the window. When she noticed him watching the story editor, Deutsch wondered if “they weren’t a couple of homosexuals and Alan was in love with him.”

It pleased Dorothy to imagine herself as the victim in this situation. The studio had had the nerve to replace her with a pretty thirty-five-year-old unpracticed screenwriter who was making only three hundred dollars a week. Helen Deutsch was soon earning three thousand a week and she wrote a string of successful films including
National Velvet, Lili
, and
I’ll Cry Tomorrow.
Adopting an appropriately offended attitude, Dorothy began to imagine that Alan was having an affair with Helen Deutsch. Though not true in this case, she herself had always found creative collaboration impossible without sex. It seemed as likely a theory as any, and it gave her another reason to increase her consumption of brandy.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of war in December, Dorothy became increasingly difficult to live with. She began the day with a morning eye-opener and drank steadily until bedtime or a blackout, whichever happened to come first. Alan affected not to notice. Dorothy checked herself into a hospital to dry out. Alan’s uncharacteristic response contrasted with his habit of automatically jumping to her rescue, a reaction that in no way denoted acknowledgment of her alcoholism. In fact, the reverse was true. While he could hardly deny that sometimes she over-drank, he did not recognize it as an uncontrollable compulsion. He was unwilling to endorse her stopping and drank along with her so that she might have company. Without meaning to, he encouraged her drinking with his collection of recipes for unusual cocktails, with expensive ice crushers and bar paraphernalia. Joseph Bryan cannot remember Dorothy ever preparing a drink for herself. “She would just hold out her glass, and Alan would jump up to refill it.”