Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (60 page)

In May 1948, she submitted the play to the Margo Jones repertory company in Dallas, a regional theater that presented quality productions of both new works and classics. It was July before she heard from Jones, a cautious response praising the play and expressing tentative interest in producing it. A month later it was scheduled for the 1949 season and its authors advanced a $150 royalty against five percent of the gross. Dorothy felt idiotically happy.

In 1948 and 1949, she attempted to recapture the success that she and Alan had achieved in Hollywood during the thirties. After her Oscar nomination for
Smash-Up,
she felt on top again. Suddenly there were job offers, money, a man. Lean times were over. Although Hollywood’s golden age was nearing its end, no one knew it. Television was not yet being taken seriously, and Hollywood remained the movie capital of the world as well as a writers’ fount of gold. Dorothy’s first assignment at Fox was to adapt Oscar Wilde’s Lady
Windermere’s
Fan with Ross and Walter Reisch. Renamed The Fan, the picture was produced by Otto Preminger and starred George Sanders and Madeleine Carroll. Next, she turned her attention to an original screenplay called
Rose-Lipped
Girls, a title inspired by A. E. Housman’s poem. It was never sold. Aside from the title, nothing about this script survives. About the same time, MGM purchased one of her short stories, “The Standard of Living,” for twenty-five hundred dollars, and an independent producer optioned “Big Blonde,” to be filmed on location in New York’s garment center. Neither of these projects reached the screen.

In collaboration with Evans at Fox, she worked on a Loretta Young-Celeste Holm comedy about two nuns, Come to the Stable, and several other pictures for which they received no credit. Referring to a film intended for Humphrey Bogart, Evans joked, “We rarely think about the picture but when we do we think that we brought it up to gutter-level.” Professionally and personally, Ross was content to accept second place, which enabled them to avoid some of the power struggles that had impaired Dorothy’s relationship with Alan toward the end.

Dorothy had highly unrealistic expectations for The Coast of Illyria. In part these were fueled by Margo Jones, who praised it in terms usually reserved for events such as Halley’s comet. Not only did she predict a Broadway production, but she also practically promised its appearance at the Edinburgh Festival of Music and Drama with Flora Robson playing Mary Lamb. In letters to Dorothy and Ross, she addressed them as “you two cuties,” “you babies,” and similar terms of flattering endearment, a personal style that made Dorothy hyperventilate. Nevertheless, she was an old hand at playing this game and sent sweet replies. “Now we know that everything people who know you have said about you is true,” she purred, a statement open to more than one reading, and she assured Jones that when they finally met she would no doubt “hug you to death.”

The Coast of Illyria opened in April 1949, for a three-week run. Arriving for the opening, Dorothy was an object of curiosity for actors and audiences alike. During intermissions, she fled the theater. She hated people coming up to her, and atheist that she was, acknowledged compliments by grunting, “Bless you,” so that she would appear friendly. At the curtain, she received a standing ovation. “Cries for author were universal and genuine. A shaky Miss Parker and a pale Mr. Evans arose from sheltered corner seats in Section B,” the
Dallas
Morning News reported. Ross, who had thus far seemed content to be treated as Dorothy’s luggage bearer, babbled to a Time reporter: “We’ve tasted blood. We don’t want to do anything ever again except write for the theater.” Dallas critics called Illyria the best play of the season and compared it favorably to Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, which had also received its premiere by Margo Jones.

When Dorothy returned to Hollywood, her moment in the sun over, it was to the heat of a California summer at the Chateau Marmont. Weekends, she and Evans drove to Malibu or Arrowhead, but mostly their life settled into a routine: studio jobs, revisions on
The Coast of Illyria
, discussion of ideas for another play, a modern work this time because she didn’t want to be typecast as writing exclusively about the Romantics. By now, there had been an addition to their household, a boxer named Flic, who was a few months old when they got him. Flic turned out to be an affectionate but timid animal who was terrified of just about everybody and everything. Dorothy, giving him the benefit of the doubt, decided that he must have been mistreated by his previous owners and began a program of assertive-ness training. It didn’t work. Norman Mailer urged her to bring Flic over to meet his dog, a large, black, ferocious German shepherd, apparently on the theory that if Flic could manage to make friends with Karl, he would be cured. Dorothy admired Mailer’s best-selling The Naked and the Dead. When he sought her out upon his arrival in Los Angeles that summer, she had found the young war novelist and his pregnant wife, Beatrice, to be amusing company. Mailer, exhibitionist as only an insecure, twenty-six-year-old first novelist can be, seemed pathetically eager to be liked. Not so with Karl, whom Dorothy and Ross agreed had a shifty look. She doubted that a confrontation would be a good idea. Mailer said she overestimated the danger and assured her that Karl would behave himself.

When Dorothy and Ross drove up to Mailer’s house, Flic must have caught a whiff of Karl because he seemed reluctant to leave the car. When they finally persuaded him to enter the living room, he immediately urinated on the carpet. Everyone could hear Karl breathing noisily in another part of the house. Dorothy, nervous, got ready to bolt, but Mailer swore he could control the situation.

At last Karl was led out on a leash. Advancing pleasantly, he first eyeballed Flic and sniffed his nose. Then he exploded like a bursting watermelon, his fleshy pink jaws spraying streams of spittle. As Mailer wrestled Karl back to a bedroom, Ross tried to quiet the petrified Flic and got his finger bitten.

As they were getting ready to drive off, Dorothy watched Mailer come scampering after them, shouting and waving his arms. Although outraged, she forced herself to speak. “I said it wouldn’t work,” she told him. Mailer said that he was sorry, but he did not look contrite. It would be nine years before she saw him again, and then she would remember only the harrowing encounter with his dog. In her eyes there was nothing he could do to redeem himself.

During the summer Dorothy was forced to cut back her drinking. Ruth Goetz, in Hollywood with Gus to write a film adaptation of their successful Broadway play The Heiress, remembers Dorothy’s entrance to a party at their house. She fell flat on her face in the hall and had to be scraped up and carried out feet first. In poor health, she suffered from back pains that sapped her strength and caused her to hobble around “bent and bitter.” Admitted to the hospital for tests and X-rays, she was treated by a doctor who lectured her about excessive drinking. “One of her doctors,” Ross Evans reported to Margo Jones, “said he didn’t like her kidneys and she later confessed that she didn’t like his nose.”

Bit by bit Dorothy resigned herself to the fact that
The Coast of Illyria
would go to neither Broadway nor Edinburgh, although it was a bitter truth to accept. In due course, this failure affected her relations with Ross, who turned moody and talked about wanting peace and quiet. She felt that if their life were much quieter they would be in a coma.

Evans suggested they leave Hollywood. Fearful of electricity in general and electrical appliances in particular, he proposed they relocate in a country where neither was highly regarded, nor continuously available. In Mexico, he promised Dorothy, they would be able to write creatively and live cheaply. He began to promote a town south of Mexico City, Cuernavaca, which had a semitropical climate year-round, sounded suitably exotic, and enjoyed popularity with American tourists. Before many weeks had passed, Ross’s imagination had transformed Cuernavaca into the promised land. When his nagging could be ignored no longer, Dorothy condescended to spending a month’s vacation in Mexico.

In March 1950, they rolled south in Evans’s dusty De Soto, with the sleeping boxer sprawled across the backseat. The trip was notable for its unfriendliness. Dorothy clothed herself in her grand-duchess disguise, and Evans did an outstanding imitation of Abner Yokum. When they arrived at the plaza in Cuernavaca, Dorothy climbed out of the car and gazed around sourly.

They rented a house on the outskirts of town for three hundred pesos a month, a bargain that Dorothy scarcely appreciated. Nor did she find the local culture as entrancing as Ross did. There was a melancholy cathedral, a single movie theater showing endless Cantinflas films, and several dinky outdoor cafés whose tables were monopolized by Americans wearing unattractive beards. She ran into a few Hollywood acquaintances who were staying at the hotels. She also looked up Martha Gellhorn, who, now divorced from Hemingway, was living there with her adopted son.

Certain activities taking place in Cuernavaca that spring would have interested Dorothy a great deal had she known of them at the time. One of the residents there was busily keeping tabs on her for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, though spotty investigation turned up very little of import. The informer was able to find out, for example, the amount of rent Dorothy paid for the house but not Ross Evans’s name. The report refers to him only as “an American writer of the male sex.” According to this document, which was added to her ever-growing file, “In Cuernavaca she is not known to have placed herself in contact with Mexican Communists but according to xxxxxxxxxxxx [name deleted by FBI] PARKER is in contact with various Spanish refugees who reside in Cuernavaca; however, PARKER does not speak Spanish and it is not believed that these contacts are very intensive.”

Dorothy found living in Cuernavaca stupendously monotonous. To make matters worse, after five or six weeks had gone by, she noticed Ross paying excessive attention to a woman who owned a dress shop in town. Jealous, eager for a bit of drama, she protested angrily, but he said nothing. When she threatened to leave, he answered that she could go that very day if she liked.

At the airport in Mexico City, a surly Ross stopped at the terminal entrance just long enough for Dorothy to scramble out before he gunned the De Soto’s motor and pointed it back toward Cuernavaca. He said later, “This so-called Land of Enchantment hardly amused Milady.” Too angry to ask where she was going, he assumed she was returning to “the land of milk and soundtracks,” but Dorothy purchased a ticket to New York.

Arriving at the Plaza Hotel with her belongings stuffed into two large straw bags, she was dressed in a dirndl skirt and a scruffy peasant blouse and looked like a migrant lettuce picker. Her request for a suite ignored the fact that such accommodations cost fifty-five dollars a day and she was carrying barely enough cash on her person to pay the taxi driver. Desperate to get her bearings, she could think of no more ideal surroundings in which to burn Ross Evans in effigy than the most expensive hotel in New York. Soon, she got hold of herself and began telephoning to gather together her friends, the tone of her voice promising electrifying stories of adventures south of the border.

When Bea Stewart arrived, Dorothy gave her a tour of the suite before putting on a woebegone face and launching into a recital of her afflictions: Li’l Abner was a totally inept writer who had never published a story; she had got him a byline in Cosmopolitan; his closest contact with movies had been Radio City Music Hall; she had got him a Hollywood screen credit, VIP treatment in Dallas, and his name in Time magazine. She had even given him the portrait of Scott Fitzgerald she had purchased from Zelda in 1934. She had not expected gratitude. On the other hand, she did not expect him to desert her for another woman, throw her out of her house, force her to flee the country, and—if all that were not horrible enough—he had stolen her dog too. From now on, she vowed, she planned to live by herself.

Three months later, she married Alan again in a splendid ceremony in Bel Air, California, after waking on the morning of August 17, 1950, pulling the blanket over her face, and warning him not to look at the bride. It was bad luck.

She behaved as if the surprise reconciliation had been foreordained and regarded it as a second chance. “Who in life gets a second chance?” she asked. Eager to have fun again, perhaps to be spoiled by a nice-looking man, she was willing to forget ten years riddled by conflict. Alan, oddly enough, was the one who felt uncertain about remarriage. He queried friends, “Do you think she needs me?” A woman he had been dating expressed herself bluntly and asked him, “How can you marry that old woman?” The question was beside the point; at forty-six, Alan had long ceased to consider the age difference. Announcing the news to the press, he said that he had asked Dottie to remarry him, because this was how it was done where he came from, and she had said yes. “You never know why one does these things,” he added lamely. They had no plans for a honeymoon because, Dorothy said, “we’ve been everywhere.”

Alan took charge of the wedding arrangements. He leased and hastily furnished a big house, booked a judge, and ordered a bridal bouquet. Charlie Brackett served as best man and Dorothy, in a nonethnic taffeta cocktail dress, was attended by Sally Foster and Miriam Hopkins. The reception at the Brackett home was memorable for lavish food and drink and the diversity of the guests, who included Humphrey Bogart, Howard and Lucinda Dietz, and James Agee. When somebody pointed out that a few of the guests had not spoken to each other for years, Dorothy agreed that was true. “Including the bride and groom,” she murmured. Budd Schulberg described the party as “a real Hollywood wedding. Dottie had a little bouquet of violets and was busy playing the bride. She went around saying, ‘What are you going to do when you love the son of a bitch?’ She was a riot and yet nobody could doubt she was absolutely serious.” Alan was heard to remark brightly that “now we can have dinner parties again.” As the evening wore on, reported Howard Dietz, “parlor games erupted and raged for hours. All the guests who could still walk played, until Dottie got mad at Alan for guessing she was the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus when she was acting out the Brooklyn Bridge.”