Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (58 page)

Since all of them, with few exceptions, were what would now be termed substance abusers, the problems they suffered are not surprising. Although Dorothy was the only one to attempt suicide, the rest selected alternate roads to self-damage, just as Dorothy herself did in the latter part of her life. Woollcott gorged himself into his grave with an early-Renaissance appetite for mountainous quantities of food; he adored creamy, calorie-loaded cocktails (he claimed the Brandy Alexander was named for him) and drank untold cups of coffee, although during rare periods of moderation he cut down to nineteen cups a day.

The others simply drank. Benchley’s friends choked when they watched him adding vodka to chocolate ice-cream sodas.

“Bob,” Scott Fitzgerald said after he had gone on the wagon, “don’t you know that drinking is slow death?”

Benchley had a ready answer. “So who’s in a hurry?”

Charles MacArthur, despite a stable second marriage to the long-suffering Helen Hayes, died of an internal hemorrhage after being hospitalized for nephritis and anemia. He was sixty and looked eighty. Eventually Heywood Broun’s hands shook and his nose reddened, although during the years when he had sedated himself with a flask of warm gin, his alcoholism had not been particularly noticeable. John O’Hara had recurrent drinking problems. Edmund Wilson, who was hospitalized during periods of manic-depression, also was afflicted by alcoholism. Enthroned on a divan in the Algonquin lobby, he ordered double martinis or double bourbons one after another, conducted brilliant, completely coherent conversations, but sometimes fell flat on his face when he got up to leave.

Frank Adams also drank too much, but it was the early stages of an Alzheimer’s-type disorder that caused his deterioration. In the late 1930s, the rhyming wit of the World became the host of a popular radio panel show, Information Please. When it made the transition to television, he was slipping mentally and had to be replaced after two performances because of complaints that he looked like a death’s-head. After Esther divorced him, which he never was able to admit, he lived at the Players Club, where it saddened fellow guests to witness his senile rambling and his intoxication. His son Timothy thought that “he aged quite prematurely. In his early sixties he looked like an old man and by the time he died at seventy-eight, he was ancient.” During F.P.A.’s final years in a nursing home, where he watched television and read paperback novels, he would have been destitute had not Harold Ross and William Shawn kept him on The New
Yorker
payroll at a modest stipend.

Those Round Tablers not afflicted by alcoholism had other crippling problems that made happiness difficult to sustain. Few of them managed to find satisfaction in love or marriage. Marc Connelly, after years of frustration over his unrequited passion for Margalo Gillmore, finally married a Mack Sennett bathing beauty, Madeline Hurlock, only to watch her fall in love with one of his best friends, Robert Sherwood, who himself had been trapped in a turbulent sadomasochistic marriage with Mary Brandon. George and Beatrice Kaufman, unable to have sex with each other, adopted a daughter and then went their separate ways emotionally, and a similar type of open-marriage arrangement was chosen by Neysa McMein and John Baragwanath. In 1928, Jane Grant divorced Harold Ross, who went on to marry twice again. The Round Tablers greeted Heywood Broun and Ruth Hale’s divorce with equanimity, but they could accept neither his remarriage to a dancer nor his conversion to Catholicism for her sake. Robert Benchley’s farcical marriage and his endless womanizing contrasted so vividly with his basic integrity and decency that practically everyone who knew him colluded in pretending that it was not happening. No doubt the worst hypocrite in this situation was Benchley himself, who continued to masquerade as an all-American, suburban family man until the end of his life. In the thirties, he had been a favorite lover of Tallulah Bankhead. Brendan Gill recalled that “she was always praising the size of his prick and telling everybody what a terrific ‘cocksman’ he was. An ordinary mortal, which Benchley was not, might have thought, ‘Yea! spread the word,’ but he simply couldn’t stand to hear it.” Edna Ferber and Aleck Woollcott sidestepped messy sexual complications by choosing celibacy.

The collective excesses of the Round Tablers made Dorothy’s problems appear unexceptional.

In 1943, Dorothy gave up her trips to Florida. Once Alan’s squadron had been transferred to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and then to Long Island, she saw practically nothing of him. When he did get a furlough, she was intent on making it perfect, which is to say, she usually managed to spoil it. As she admitted in “The Lovely Leave,” a short story she published in the
Woman’s Home Companion
, their meetings always ended in disaster. All it took was a single bitchy word from either to start a shoot-out, then they both turned glacial, and before she knew it, the door would be slamming behind him. “When she knew he was gone, she was cool and still no longer. She ran about the little flat, striking her breast and sobbing. Then she had two months to ponder what had happened, to see how she had wrought the ugly small ruin. She cried in the nights.”

She also cursed him in the nights. Once she sent a letter that seemed to be nothing but a half-dozen unrelated items of gossip about people they knew. At the end she added a postscript, suggesting he look at the first letter of each sentence to decipher her real message. The letters spelled out FUCK YOU.

She seldom visited the farm. Wolfinger’s general store in Ottsville could generally count on unloading certain brands of toilet paper merely by mentioning it was used by Mrs. Parker, but now the toilet paper had to sell on its own merits. She moved to the New Weston, a residence hotel on the corner of Madison Avenue and Fiftieth Street, where she had a pleasant two-room apartment. She made it homier by bringing from the country a few pieces of furniture and one or two precious possessions—a Utrillo landscape and a cocktail shaker engraved with the words TO ROBERT BENCHLEY FROM HIS SUNDAY SCHOOL CLASS.

Meanwhile, she was not the only one of her crowd to be alone. Lillian Hellman was in pretty much the same situation after Dashiell Hammett enlisted and was shipped to the Aleutian Islands. Hellman had adjusted to his absence. She was occupied with the film version of
Watch on the Rhine
and thinking of beginning a new play. Dorothy gave the appearance of being occupied. She worked for the Spanish Refugee Appeal, now part of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, and she made speeches on behalf of causes as diverse as Yugoslav relief, the rescue of European Jews, and children’s book week. When she volunteered to sell war bonds, the Treasury Department teamed her up with Ogden Nash and a young New Yorker editor just returned from New Guinea and sent them on a tour of Pennsylvania to visit schools. To E. J. Kahn, Jr., who had joined the magazine in 1937, Dorothy was a figure from another era. “At the New
Yorker
she was considered a great lady,” but in his twenty-seven-year-old eyes she appeared “small and faded, too world-weary to be witty.”

While Benchley was still alive, she made several trips to Hollywood. She would tell people that she was doing a picture with Gregory Ratoff, or she might name other producers. If it was true, there remains no record of such employment, no screen credits. She stayed at the Garden of Allah. In Benchley’s bungalow, the bar never closed.

Dorothy insisted that Helen come out and visit. Due to wartime travel restrictions, it was an exhausting train trip that meant sitting up for several nights. Dorothy took her sister to see the standard sights. They went to Romanoff’s and to the set of a Joan Crawford picture, and she introduced Helen to Marlene Dietrich and George Murphy. All the time Dorothy kept putting down the movie stars. “Everyone makes a swell fuss over Dot,” Helen wrote to her son Bill. “I can’t understand why she hates it so.” Although Dorothy outdid herself to show Helen a good time, Helen had difficulty with the pace and found it a relief to go home. “I seemed to be continually drinking. I really stood it beautifully, too. I was surprised at myself.”

In the fall of 1943, Dorothy returned to New York because Alan was due to be sent overseas, and she wanted to say good-bye. It was unbearable for her to admit that his life offered her no place. She felt deeply wounded that he was so obviously relieved to be free of her and suffered from intense, almost paranoid jealousy. His friends, the air corps, and the entire army of the United States disgusted her. It seemed as if he had gained a whole new life, but, “I have half an old one,” she wrote, feeling deprived. The thought of Alan having any kind of existence separate from hers made her furious, and knowing that it was she who had forced him to enlist made it even worse.

After he left in November, she rushed back to the Garden of Allah to spend the Christmas holidays with her Hollywood friends, but she was in a smoldering mood. At nine o’clock on Christmas morning she knocked on the door of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, wanting company. This was extraordinarily early for her to be up, and since she looked queasy, it was likely she had never been to bed. She told them that Alan’s checkbook stubs had revealed spending fifteen thousand dollars on a bracelet for Miriam Hopkins. Since this information failed to jibe with her portrayal of him as a dedicated pederast, the Hacketts were understandably perplexed.

In the evening, she turned up with two photographs of Alan in uniform and asked the Hacketts which one they preferred. When they reluctantly made a choice, she presented them with both photos, frames and all.

Helen suffered a minor stroke that left her with diminished sensation in her hands, and then developed pneumonia. On January 18, 1944, she died at the age of fifty-seven. Bill Droste wired Dorothy of his mother’s death. She wired back immediately, saying that she would be unable to get back East in time for the funeral, but wished to pay for the burial expenses. She asked Bill to order a blanket of roses to cover the coffin. He replied that, while Helen had expressly forbidden flowers, they would gladly accept her offer to pay for the funeral.

Dorothy was stunned. Her customary manner of dealing with death was to wire Toni Strassman at The Viking Press and direct her to order cut flowers to be charged to her royalty account. Her offer of flowers having been rejected, she did not know what to do. The Drostes heard nothing more from her.

“We guessed she was annoyed with us,” said Marge Droste. “We didn’t get the blanket of roses, and she never paid for the funeral.”

Three months after Helen’s death, Bert Rothschild died suddenly. Since Dorothy had not been as close to him and Mate, it was easier to bear. As for her eldest brother, nobody had heard from poor Harry in thirty-five years. She had stopped speculating long ago on whether he was dead or alive. Helen’s passing threw her off balance.

William Targ, an editor with World Publishing in Cleveland, was not only an admirer of Dorothy’s but an exceptionally personable man. For more than a year, he pursued her with a proposal that she edit an anthology of women writers. He was confident she could do it because the volume would require a minimum of writing, only brief critical introductions to the writers. He finally enticed her into accepting.

Whenever Targ came to New York, he called Dorothy to inquire about her progress, and they would meet for dinner at the New Weston. Claiming to be working hard, she pointed to a sheet of paper in her typewriter.

“You see that?” she said with a reassuring smile. “That’s a page of your book.” It was a lie, but not one that he cared to challenge, any more than he objected when she broke appointments with telegrams full of absurd excuses. She had German measles, or she had to fly to Amsterdam.

One rainy evening, she and her poodle Misty paid a call on Targ at the Warwick Hotel. As usual, she chain-smoked her Chesterfields, played with her dinner, and showed an unquenchable thirst for martinis. When it was time to leave, she was tremendously plastered. Targ wanted to take her home in a cab, but she refused. At the curb, as they began to argue, she donned her aristocratic manners. Targ pointed out that she had no coat or umbrella and it was pouring rain. Dragging the sleepy Misty behind her, she disappeared into the storm and left Targ standing there soaking wet.

Facing reality, Targ decided that “she wasn’t capable of doing any work that she cared to see in print.” That was a tactful way to describe it.

Dorothy felt as if she were being gnawed by “a great, grey rat,” a rat whose name was Captain Alan Campbell. In London with Air Force Intelligence, Alan had yet to come within sniffing distance of a battlefield. Judging by the exhilarated tone of his letters, Dorothy concluded that he was having a lovely time. It seemed wrong somehow to be enjoying a war so much.

Toward the spring of 1944, she first began to worry about small, cryptic hints in his references to dinner party invitations and weekends spent whizzing about the English countryside to palatial homes. At first she ignored the hints, but they became impossible to disregard. Every now and then names were mentioned; she began to wonder if Alan might be sleeping with someone. She had not expected him to remain celibate all this time. Men would be men, she supposed, and “when were soldiers true?” She wrote a poem, her last, gingerly giving him permission to sleep with anybody he liked and emphasizing that he should not feel guilty about it either. She simply had one request:

Only, for the nights that were,
Soldier, and the dawns that came,
When in sleep you turn to her
Call her by my name.

After VE Day, Alan was stationed in Paris for a time, but he returned to London. He wrote Dorothy that he had fallen in love with another woman, a titled and wealthy aristocrat. This was supposed to be a secret because the woman was married and had three children. According to Alan she was passionately in love with him.

Dorothy was completely taken by surprise. Her immediate reaction was to panic, drink, and slide into a black hole of gloom. She consulted a psychiatrist for a time, but it failed to help, probably because she regarded therapists as quacks. In this crisis, Toni Strassman, Harold Guinzburg’s former secretary who had become a literary agent, often held her hand. A kindhearted woman with no family responsibilities of her own, Strassman lived nearby and was willing to slip over to the New Weston to keep her company for whole evenings. Since Strassman knew Alan, she was a logical confidante to whom Dorothy could unburden her feelings about the Englishwoman, whose existence she wanted to conceal from her friends. Dorothy assured Strassman that she was having a nervous breakdown: She related anecdotes about her psychiatrist, alluded to powerful medications, and claimed to be receiving electroshock treatments. Since she looked half-dead, Strassman assumed she was telling the truth.