Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (63 page)

Almost immediately, Dorothy and d’Usseau began work on a second play. The protagonist of The Ice Age, Gordon Corey, is a passive man of twenty-five, extremely good-looking, always tanned, married, strapped for money, and living with his mother. Even after twenty-five years, Dorothy’s hatred of Horte Campbell remained intense, because she included dialogue that characterized Gordon Corey’s mother as evil and stupid. After finding a job at an art museum, he is seduced by its owner, Adrian Zabel, a wealthy and cultivated homosexual of almost satanic dimensions who regards him as a perfect sex object. When Daisy Corey, Gordon’s wife, accuses her husband of sleeping with his employer, he shouts hysterically that he no longer feels sexual desire for her and cannot even bear to touch her. Once the homosexual affair has driven away Daisy and their newborn child, and Adrian is planning to add Gordon to his permanent collection, Gordon bashes in his head with a piece of marble sculpture as the curtain falls.

In the fall of 1955, producer Robert Whitehead agreed to take an option on The Ice Age and advanced the authors fifteen hundred dollars. When the good news was reported to Dorothy, she rejoiced at getting a deal that seemed “very pretty and I love it.” What she did not suspect was that Whitehead cared little for the play and did not intend to produce it. He was, however, fond of Dorothy:

The subject of homosexuality wasn’t unusual in the fifties, and by then I was getting kind of bored reading plays about people whose mothers and fathers had made them fags. It was a bad play, and I didn’t want to do it, but I must have decided, “Oh Christ, I’ll option it because of Dottie and then let the option drop.”

That was precisely what happened. The Ice Age failed to enthuse Dorothy’s New York agent, Leah Salisbury, because it sounded more like a political tract than a play. She dutifully tried to interest Emlyn Williams in playing the museum director, but when these negotiations failed and the Whitehead option was dropped, she made no further effort to arrange a production. By that time, Dorothy herself had grown disenchanted and was willing to let it die a natural death.

The Ice Age concluded her professional collaboration with d‘Usseau as well as her intimacy with him and his wife. During the McCarthy period, the couple’s lives had grown increasingly rocky. Arnaud d’Usseau had been described as a member of the Hollywood Communist Party by Martin Berkeley and others. Summoned before HUAC in 1953, he declined to discuss his political affiliations, past or present, on the basis of the Fifth Amendment and spent most of his time on the witness stand energetically engaging the congressmen in debates about anti-Semitism and racial discrimination. Susan d‘Usseau, unlike her husband, was closemouthed, and her time on the stand was accordingly brief. She took the Fifth and First amendments whenever queried about Party membership and refused to answer almost every question put to her. While neither of the d’Usseaus cooperated with the Committee, neither was cited for contempt. Their marriage broke up.

Although Dorothy had needed the d‘Usseaus, she resented assistance and hated the obligations that such dependency always entailed. In the end, she retaliated by writing a story about characters who loosely resembled the d’Usseaus in some respects. She portrayed the woman as the epitome of an abandoned wife who whines so bitterly and incessantly that nobody can stand to be around her, and the husband as a man who walks out on a marriage considered ideal because, his wife decides later, he was going through male menopause. Her picture of the wife was especially heartless.

Dorothy had difficulty feeling appreciative for the temporary sobriety the d’Usseaus imposed on her—even if it made possible two playscripts.

Chapter 17

HIGH-FORCEPS DELIVERIES

1955-1960

Dorothy’s dream of Broadway fame may have been thwarted, but it brought her back to New York, forced her to plan a life without Alan, and paved the way for her return to writing fiction. For the first time since 1941, her byline appeared in
The New Yorker
.

While working on The Ice Age, where homosexuality had been a central motif and she had revealed a predictable lack of sensitivity in her treatment of certain types of homosexuals, she was also writing “I Live on Your Visits,” which was published in
The New Yorker
in January 1955. Once again her preoccupation with homosexuality overflowed into her work. Inspired by observation of a friend’s relations with her sons, the story was primarily about the sterile life of an alcoholic divorcee who lives vicariously on the visits of an adolescent son now making his home with his father and stepmother. Dorothy must have been privately appalled, because she was pitiless in exposing her friend as a drunken mother who inflicts untold damage on her child. For comic relief, however, Dorothy could not resist adding a peripheral character who drifts in and out of the story, a character whom editor William Maxwell described as “a chatterbox homosexual queen, well along in years and terribly amusing, a perfectly standard character that everybody would now recognize. My superiors stuck at the idea of writing about such a person.” He was instructed to inform Dorothy that the magazine would not publish the story unless the homosexual was removed. “She agreed to this, reluctantly, and probably only because she was in need of money,” said Maxwell. She certainly needed money, but her greater need was to publish fiction again. The story as printed suffers from monotonous repetition in showing the mother’s unconscious cruelty. While it did not require a homosexual character, it needed a counterpoint to dilute the intensity of Dorothy’s painful portrait of the mother and son. Her instinct was essentially correct.

The New
Yorker
published two additional stories. “Lolita” (1955) concerns the necessity for escaping from the type of possessive, manipulating mother whom Dorothy had written about in her two recent plays and in “I Live on Your Visits.” In this case, she made the child a daughter, a plain, thoroughly undistinguished young woman who extricates herself from her mother by marrying a man who is successful, handsome, and very much in love with her. Lolita’s mother, having happily concluded that her duckling daughter will never attract a man, is bewildered and jealous. Her only comfort is the hope that someday John Marble will leave Lolita, and she will be forced to return home.

In “Lolita,” for the first time, Dorothy departed from her usual technique by writing entirely in narrative. Her previous fiction had always relied heavily on telling a story through what people said to each other, her ear for recreating such conversations being uncanny. “I haven’t got a visual mind. I hear things.” In 1955, she vowed, “I’m not going to do those he-said
she-said
things any more, they’re over, honey, they’re over. I want to do the story that only can be told in the narrative form, and though they’re going to scream about the rent, I’m going to do it.” But her experimentation with the all-narrative form was short-lived because in her next story, “The Banquet of Crow,” her scathing picture of a couple like the d’Usseaus, she returned to dialogue.

Throughout the fifties, Dorothy’s relations with The New
Yorker
underwent a change. She ceased to feel a personal attachment to the magazine after Harold Ross died of cancer in 1951 and was succeeded as editor by William Shawn. Now she regarded the publication as she did any other. In her dealings with William Maxwell, she adopted a manner that he described as “very solicitous and motherly. It was unnerving.” He felt that her current work lacked the sharp vernacular quality that once had distinguished her fiction. “Her style had become heavily mannered and grew more and more like a fictional King James Bible.”

Dorothy’s next—and last—story was written in the stately style that made Maxwell uncomfortable. In “The Bolt Behind the Blue” (1958), an unmarried secretary who is poor and plain finds herself philanthropically befriended by a rich woman. Mary Nicholl is invited to Alicia Hazleton’s home for cocktails, but never for dinners, so that Alicia can show off her house and her glamorous wardrobe. The story is a study in female pretense and self-deception with the secretary swearing after she leaves that she wouldn’t trade places with the rich woman for anything on earth, and Alicia Hazleton declaring she would be delighted to exchange. It was amazing, the narrator observed, that a bolt did not swoop from the sky and strike down both of them. Around this time, Dorothy complained to James Thurber and Edmund Wilson that The New
Yorker
had been rejecting her stories lately and possibly it is this one she meant. At any rate, it was published instead in Esquire, where she recently had begun writing a monthly column and was establishing a close personal relationship with publisher Arnold Gingrich.

In January 1957, The New York Times asked Dorothy to review Sid Perelman’s latest book, The
Road
to
Miltown,
a piece that appeared prominently on the front page of the Book Review. It caught the eye of Harold Hayes, a young editor at Esquire who had long been a fan of hers. “Seeing the review made me wonder why I hadn’t read anything by her lately. So I tracked her down to the Volney and asked her to do something for us.” The assignment was a year-end round-up of notable books. On the strength of that article, the magazine offered her the position of regular book columnist beginning with the April 1958 issue, an honored spot that once had been occupied by writers such as Sinclair Lewis, James T. Farrell, and William Lyon Phelps. While
Esquire
was less familiar to her than The New Yorker, she had known Arnold Gingrich since the thirties and his wife, Jane, even longer than that, and she immediately felt at home as a contributor. Said Harold Hayes, “She was precious to the magazine, which had been going through a fairly fallow period and was just starting to come alive again. If
Esquire
was being seen anew, Dorothy Parker was one of the reasons. Whereas she may not have regarded writing the column as a great literary period in her career, her doing it was one of the great things happening to us.”

Esquire gave her the first financial security she had enjoyed since the 1930s. She was paid six hundred dollars a month, with raises until the figure eventually reached seven hundred and fifty, and she could count on a check even when she missed a column. There were times when Harold Hayes found it necessary to issue a delicate reminder that the deadline was approaching or make last-minute trips to the Volney to collect the column. She was charmed by the young North Carolinian who always treated her like a lace doily, understood that “she had a miserable time writing,” and gave her full credit for being, as he said, “one of the major writers in the country, in my mind.” With Hayes she allowed herself to act playful, even a bit flirtatious. One day when he telephoned to compliment her on a column, she trilled happily, “Will you marry me?” Hayes knew that she drank because sometimes on the telephone her articulation was distorted. This distressed him because “she was an elderly lady. But I certainly never considered her a drunk. Occasionally she just would have a little too much to drink—I think the old-fashioned word is tipsy.”

During her five years as Esquire’s book reviewer, Dorothy wrote forty-six columns and reviewed more than two hundred books, a tremendous output for her but a lot less than Arnold Gingrich would have liked. Having lured her to his magazine, he continually badgered her to write more pieces—a retrospective of the Jazz Age or a piece on speakeasies, he suggested—and Dorothy politely agreed these would make splendid subjects. She hooted at his notion that the twenties had been glamorous and proposed a title that she thought was honest: “The Dingy Decade.” But, recalled Gingrich, “it was so hard getting her regular columns out of her with anything reasonably resembling regularity that I never did have much hope of our getting the extra piece.” The only bonus she gave him was her short story, “The Bolt Behind the Blue.”

At first she struggled hard to meet deadlines, but then she could not resist playing games, perhaps unconsciously withholding copy so that she would hear from Hayes or from fiction editor Rust Hills whose name tickled her (she said it conjured up images of New Jersey suburbs), one or the other of whom might rush up to the Volney to pick up her column. More frequently, she was tardy because reading the books became a grinding effort, aside from the fact that she hated writing. The longer she sat at her typewriter, the more paralyzed she became. Gingrich recognized this problem and before long thought of her writer’s block as a complicated case of childbirth. He viewed his own job as obstetrics, and often referred to the monthly operation as a “high-forceps delivery.” Not that forceps always worked, but his success rate at prying copy from her beat all other publishers. There were those who believed that not even a cesarean section could make Dorothy meet a writing deadline.

Aside from Gingrich’s generosity about money, he rose to her defense whenever asked why he had hired a blacklisted writer, although it was unlikely she knew about the mail that attacked
Esquire
for publishing her. Would he, a reader asked, employ a Nazi storm trooper for an editorial position? Then why was he hiring a Communist? Gingrich replied curtly that he knew nothing of Dorothy’s private life, but judging by her writings for Esquire, if she was a Communist, then the late Senator Robert Taft was a dangerous radical and so was his father.