Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (56 page)

Like many who live in alcoholic families, Alan found it natural to assume a custodial role. He accepted his wife’s tendency to overreact, feel sorry for herself, and embrace the victim’s role. Not only did he tolerate her selfishness, but also he shut his eyes when she showed indifference toward his interests. He was finally getting fed up. Nothing he did pleased her, and when he responded to her peevish moods with impatience she called him “a cross little man.”

While Dorothy was in the hospital, Laura and Sid Perelman busily carried olive branches between the warring parties:

Our old friend Dotnick has been in something of a spin—loaded on brandy by eleven in the morning and the like. She clearly resents Alan working with Miss Helen Deutsch, she’s fed up with pictures and picture people, and by Thursday of this past week, she had got herself into such shape that she had to go off to a sanitarium for three or four days. All through this, Alan was phoning us at the studio and running in to our apartment biting his nails and telling us how unreasonable she was.

The Perelmans paid a call on Dorothy. Wan and sober, she announced her readiness to chuck the marriage and return to New York for good. They conveyed this threat to Alan, who predictably rushed to her side, humbled himself, and patched up the quarrel. “As of last night,” Sid notified the Goetzes, “they were home together again, but it’s hardly Paola [sic] and Francesca.”

Seeing them together brought to Sid Perelman’s mind the image of a cobra and a mongoose. It was more true than he realized. Ever since war had been declared, Dorothy had been testing Alan in new and provocative ways. To prove that he loved her, she wanted him to join the army. She had warned him a thousand times about the evils of Fascism. Now the whole world was in flames and “there were men getting their balls shot off, and here he was in Beverly Hills.” Were she a man, she knew that she would enlist. “She would say very rough things to him,” remembered a friend.

Her demand was outrageous because Alan, at thirty-eight, could easily have avoided serving in the armed forces. Despite his education at Virginia Military Institute, which had been Horte’s idea, he had always shown more interest in perfecting the art of making chocolate soufflés than in warfare. He made a confession to Dorothy: He had hated military school. After practically starving to death as an actor, he was now flourishing in his career as a screenwriter and had no desire to throw it away by joining the army.

Excuses like these made Dorothy livid. She was not suggesting he go to the Ukraine and join the Red Army, only to be a patriot and defend his country.

Alan, however, was oblivious to such taunts. He couldn’t go to war because he had to install a new chimney at Fox House, and that was that.

Throughout the winter of 1942, hectored almost without letup, Alan gnawed his already bitten fingernails and increased his drinking. Now that neither one seemed to be in control, some of their friends began avoiding them. Regular drinking companions like screenwriters Phoebe and Henry Ephron suddenly claimed to be spending a great deal of time in Palm Springs. Henry Ephron felt the Campbells were a bad influence. “We were working very hard and they would want to stop in every night to sit around and drink, then at the end of the evening we’d have to drive them and their car home. We just had to drop them. It came to a point where we’d put the cars in the garage and the lights out, so it would look as if we weren’t at home.”

But the Campbells were too absorbed in their own high drama to be hurt. Alan probably enjoyed the game as much as Dorothy. These months may well have been among the most spicy of their entire marriage. Tantalizing her, Alan told Dorothy about movie people who were being commissioned as majors or colonels and said that if he should ever decide to join up he would want a commission. This elitist idea sent Dorothy into a frenzy.

At last, in the spring of 1942, Alan made up his mind to enlist as a private. By now the battles they had waged on the subject were so plentiful that it was easy for Alan to forget that enlisting had been Dorothy’s idea. Wisely, his victorious wife did not remind him. She assured Aleck Woollcott that “no one had told him what was right, except himself,” that he had enlisted “without telling one soul.” This scenario may have fooled Woollcott, but those who knew better were incredulous. Dorothy, having got her way, full of respect for her husband, was feeling intensely satisfied. When she repeatedly spoke of how much she loved him, she meant it sincerely.

Alan’s plans stunned his mother. After confusing the issue by calling him heartless and inconsiderate, she rounded up a delegation of Point Pleasant matrons who descended on the farm like vigilantes to try to talk Alan out of leaving “that poor sick woman all alone.” When this failed, Horte faked a heart attack. Dorothy, furious, reminded herself that she had never been a vengeful woman. Her philosophy was that if you had patience “the bastards will get theirs and it will be fancier than anything you could ever have thought up. But I would ... give quite a large bit of my soul if something horrible would happen to that woman for poisoning Alan’s last days here.” Whether by “here” she meant Pipersville or the planet earth is ambiguous.

Among those praising Alan’s decision as deeply courageous was Gerald Murphy, who presented him with a wristwatch engraved with the admiring but melodramatic inscription, QUI SENSAT ACET [He who feels, acts].

This proved far too high-toned for Robert Benchley, who wisecracked that the watch should have read WHOSE WIFE FEELS, ACTS.

Chapter 15

THE LEAKING BOAT

1942-1947

In the first days of Alan’s absence, she attempted to minimize her loneliness by drawing closer to her family. She first called her sister, who was separated from her second husband and living with her daughter in East Patchogue, Long Island. Informed of Alan’s departure, Helen neglected to offer the sort of commiseration that Dorothy expected and instead reported how the war was affecting East Patchogue that summer. A few of the Saturday night dances had been canceled.

Dorothy next telephoned Bert, who still worked in the garment business as a dress salesman. When she dialed his home in Queens, she got her sister-in-law. Mate affected to find nothing exceptionable about Alan’s enlistment because, she explained, he was a college graduate. Her son Bertram, only a year younger than Alan, would like to train in aviation, but had no college degree. When Dorothy interrupted to say that Alan had enlisted as a private, Mate changed the subject. By the time Dorothy hung up, she was cursing to herself.

Despite her fame, there had been no real alteration in the Rothschild family roles over the years. To them, she was still the clever little sister, a source of pride and pleasure. Dorothy, for her part, continued to scorn their tributes on the grounds that they could not be trusted to judge her worth or even to fathom her thinking. Despite her complaints about the Rothschilds, she in fact considered Bert “not bad,” actually high praise from her, and she expressed her deep-rooted affection for Helen by her usual generosity. Her niece Lel recalled that, whenever she visited the

Algonquin as a child, her mother would warn her “not to admire anything Aunt Dot is wearing because she’ll take it off her back and give it to you.” During Lei’s adolescence, Dorothy bought her a squirrel coat. On her marriage to Robert Iveson, she gave her the Cartier diamond watch that once had been a gift from Seward Collins. (The watch, now owned by Lel’s daughter Nancy Arcaro, has become a family heirloom.)

Failing to find comfort in her family, Dorothy holed up at Fox House to redesign a life without Alan. She was determined to pull her socks up and prove her competency: “I’ve got to write a lot of stories—if, of course, I can. I’ve got the farm to keep going. I’ve got myself. I’ve got Alan’s mother.” It occurred to her that she should undertake some kind of factory work, perhaps welding, but quickly abandoned the idea as impractical. Still, a nine-to-five civilian job remained a possibility, a position like the one she had at
Vanity
Fair during the last war, when a regular routine had helped pass the time. Before Alan left, he strongly advised against her living at the farm because anyone “who cannot drive a car, much less make coffee” would be better off in Manhattan. He spoke to a friend who managed the luxurious Ritz Hotel about giving her a good rate on a suite. Even if she did take a place in town, she wrote Woollcott, she intended to make periodical visits to Pipersville as often as the hired man could spare the gas to meet her at the station.

Mapping out a strategy was simple. Living it was harder. In mid-September, after moving to the Ritz, she telephoned Harold Ross to ask for a job. Not a writing assignment, she explained, but a staff position. While Ross was struggling to comprehend the idea, which he did not for a moment take seriously, she went on to say that she was living at the Ritz, and she argued that it was costly but not unreasonably so, indeed there were hidden benefits that actually made it a bargain. Her logic must have struck him as sounding like a miracle on the order of the fishes and the loaves, and since publishing a weekly magazine on a shoestring always had meant looking for “Jesuses” who might save his operation, he pricked up his ears. He later joked to Marc Connelly about making her head of the design and layout department. He heard nothing further from her. When he subsequently telephoned the Ritz, he never found her in, for the good reason that she was seldom there.

Alan took basic training at the Army Air Corps base in Miami Beach, where his barracks turned out to be a deluxe hotel that had been requisitioned for servicemen. Pulling KP duty in the dining hall, he was given the job of serving dessert to men coming through the chow line. One day while trying to spoon five canned cherries into each passing tin cup, he heard someone call him stingy and order him to pour in the whole can. Alan’s response was to hold up the line while he recounted to make sure he’d given the soldier no more than the regulation five. Glancing up, he was startled to see a familiar face, Broadway director Joshua Logan. Immediately Alan invited him to his room because he wanted to give him some ashtrays. Logan said he had no need of ashtrays, but Alan insisted. Everybody in Miami Beach needed ashtrays, and he had been saving these for friends. Logan, as it happened, was the first one to come along. After that, they became friendly, and before Alan knew it he was having a a good time. Miami Beach seemed like a huge Hollywood soundstage with fake palm trees and a Technicolor moon. The place was full of tall, skinny, suntanned men in starched uniforms who looked like Jimmy Stewart and boogiewoogied around Miami singing, chewing Wrigley’s, boozing, and living in comradely style in hotels that had colossal swimming pools and cocktail lounges full of girls with pompadours. The Army Air Corps, as anyone could plainly see, was a party, and Alan loved parties.

In November, he wasted no time in applying for Officer Candidate School. Josh Logan, who had not initially wanted the responsibility of being an officer, changed his mind and applied as a gesture of friendship. They were both accepted. Right before OCS graduation, anticipating the revels ahead once they were officers and able to live as they pleased, they rented a small apartment across the street from their hotel and stocked it with food and liquor.

Alan, quite popular in Squadron 24, soon won the reputation of being a wit. Practically nobody was aware that he was the husband of Dorothy Parker, and some had no idea who she was. Nor did they know or much care about his job in civilian life. During a physical examination that included a routine psychiatric interview, the doctor asked for his highest earnings as a civilian.

“Five thousand dollars,” Alan said.

“Five thousand dollars a year is all you made?” said the doctor.

“Five thousand dollars a week.”

The doctor stared a moment before asking, “Ever had any mental illness in the family?”

Dorothy’s first reaction to Alan’s application to Officer Candidate School had been annoyance. When he had written to ask the birthplace of her father for the OCS application, she had gotten obstructive. Alan later recalled that “trying to get the little woman to write a letter stating any facts about her old man was a career in itself.” Prior to the service, Alan would not have dared call Dorothy “the little woman.” He was beginning to sound less and less like a man who seemed to be content bringing up the rear in his marriage and professional life. Dorothy noticed this with considerable misgiving.