Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (64 page)

Arnold Gingrich was not the only person looking out for her welfare. Among those aware of her precarious financial position, nobody was more determined for her to have a decent income than Leah Salisbury, the formidable literary agent who made a point of inventing fresh angles so that Dorothy might profit from the work she had produced during her lifetime. Although she had used topflight movie agents to obtain screen assignments, she never had a literary agent until 1952 because she held them in low esteem. She acquired Salisbury by chance. Her client list included the Perelmans, the Goetzes, the Hacketts, and Arnaud d‘Usseau. When d’Usseau and Dorothy began to collaborate, it seemed logical for Salisbury to represent both of them in negotiations with theatrical producers. After the partnership ended, Salisbury continued to handle Dorothy’s professional affairs.

The sad truth was that after forty years as a writer she owned practically nothing tangible to show for it. All the money earned in Hollywood and from her collected works had vanished. She had been imprudent when it came to investing—she dreaded thinking about the future let alone planning for it—but that did not mean she took responsibility for her present circumstances. In 1958, she was sixty-five, an age when most people look forward to retirement. She felt that everyone expected her to toil until she sunk in her tracks like a creaking plowhorse. Although the prospect was horrible, she could not retire. She had no money.

Dorothy observed happily as Leah Salisbury wheeled and dealed on her behalf. Salisbury did not hesitate to crack down on pirates, amateur or professional, who had long been in the habit of using Dorothy’s work for everything from high school dramatic productions to network television programs. Shutting down unauthorized productions and confiscating scripts and tape recordings, she warned violators that they would be lucky if Dorothy did not bring charges against them. Salisbury told Dorothy that if her material was to be adapted for the stage, it must be a first-class production that would bring her pride and happiness, in addition to the money. Dorothy agreed. Those who requested permission to adapt her stories and verse for the stage or screen were often sped on their ways with regrets that Miss Parker did not feel her material could be a success in the form they presented.

With one hand Salisbury labored to transform old writings into current income, as when she sold René Clair the film rights to “Here We Are” for four thousand dollars, and with the other she urged Dorothy to undertake new projects. As a result, Dorothy signed a contract with Bernard Geis Associates to write a biography of Ethel Barrymore, in collaboration with Barrymore’s son Samuel Colt. As the Geis press release announced, Dorothy’s insights into the distinguished actress would produce a lasting contribution to American letters. Bernard Geis admitted that the book, “never came close to transpiring.” Along with the Barrymore book, he also signed her to write her autobiography, a project that Leah Salisbury had been pressing her to consider. To Salisbury, it must have seemed that a memoir would be a fitting subject, not only in terms of public interest but also a book that Dorothy might be strongly motivated to complete. For all her respect for her client and a tolerance for eccentricities that sometimes verged on the saintly, Salisbury was not sufficiently familiar with Dorothy’s personal history to understand that the subject had been attempted fiction-ally in Sonnets in Suicide and ended in disaster.

Dorothy confided in Quentin Reynolds that “rather than write my life story I would cut my throat with a dull knife.” Like some other authors, she considered publishers to be fair game, but, in this case, she must have felt guilty or sorry for Geis because she decided to return his advance. By the time she reached this decision, however, she had already spent a good deal of it. To show that she meant well, she sent a down payment on her debt. “Dear Bernie,” she wrote,

This is, as you see, only a part of what I owe you for your advance. The book—oh, I can’t. I’ve tried and tried, I’ve gone away alone, I’ve done my damndest. But it doesn’t come—I’m sorry I have to pay you back in bits and pieces—but times are like that with me—Always with gratitude and affection—

Whether she was referring to the Barrymore book or to her own memoir is irrelevant, for she could do neither. In the letter she enclosed a check for a tenth of the advance. Geis felt happy to write off the remaining ninety percent “to experience and to the privilege of being able to say I once almost published a book and a half by Dorothy Parker.”

The following year, Salisbury tried to engineer another contract for Dorothy’s life with editor Lee Schryver at Doubleday, but by then the Parker reputation for ripping off publishing houses had grown, and Doubleday stipulated certain fail-safe conditions. Dorothy dragged her feet in signing a contract in which payments were contingent upon delivering sections of the manuscript. Finally, Doubleday gave up. Random House publisher Bennett Cerf severely criticized her for accepting advances on books that she had no intention of writing. He considered her behavior unprincipled.

Salisbury remained undaunted. When Columbia Pictures approached her with the idea of making a film about Dorothy’s life, she gave serious attention to their proposal. The story editor at Columbia, thinking big bucks, reminded her about the financial success of such movies as The
Jolson Story
. Salisbury passed along the idea to Dorothy, who was in Martha’s Vineyard visiting Lillian Hellman.

Dear Dorothy—

Would you be interested in discussing a motion picture to be based on your wonderfully interesting life—don’t shoot me, I was asked and said I’d try to find out!

Dorothy did not dignify the letter with a reply.

Lillian Hellman was eager to venture onto the musical stage with an operetta based on Voltaire’s witty novel
Candide.
She wrote the book, Leonard Bernstein composed the score, and poet Richard Wilbur assumed chief responsibility for the lyrics. Initially, other lyrics were written by James Agee, followed by John Latouche. When he withdrew, Dorothy was invited to step in.

“I had only one lyric in it.... Thank God I wasn’t there while it was going on. There were too many geniuses involved.” The show’s history did turn out to be chaotic. The story line underwent constant revisions, and Hellman produced a dozen versions before they got a satisfactory working script, but even then the operetta suffered from her heavy, pretentious book. Dorothy was irritated by Leonard Bernstein’s presumption that he knew how to write lyrics. She complained to Hellman that he clearly wanted to handle the whole show himself. Some years later, she was still shaking her head over his mania “to do everything and do it better than anybody, which he does, except for lyrics. The idea was, I think, to keep Voltaire, but they didn’t. But everyone ended up good friends except John Latouche, who died.”

Her single contribution to Candide was the droll lyric for the song “Gavotte.” Leonard Bernstein recalled that Dorothy “was very sweet, very drunk, very forthcoming, very cooperative and, in sum, a dream to work with. I expected it would take weeks of visits and phone calls to get the lyric, but amazingly we had it the next day.” It is hard to imagine Dorothy writing anything overnight, but perhaps she did compose the lyric fairly quickly. The tone of Madame Sofronia’s tabulating of her many woes echoes Dorothy in one of her Lord-how-I-pity-me moods:

I’ve got troubles, as I said,
Mother’s dying, Father’s dead.
All my uncles are in jail.
It’s a very moving tale.

Sometimes she sounds as though she is mocking herself:

Though our name, I say again, is
Quite the proudest name in
Venice,
Our
afflictions are
so many,
And we haven’t got a penny.

In the end, though, Dorothy’s connection with
Candide
did nothing to enhance her reputation or to alter her penniless state. The show was, she thought, “so overproduced that you couldn’t tell what was going on at all.”

Candide opened in December 1956. Despite the Bernstein score, a stunning production, and admiring reviews, the audiences stayed away and it closed after seventy-three performances.

During the late 1950s, Dorothy finally began to reap long overdue professional rewards from the literary establishment. The National Institute of Arts and Letters had recently set up the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award to honor an older person who was not a member of the Institute for achievement and integrity. In 1958, its third year, the award went to Dorothy. Lillian Hellman had added her name to the list of contenders, which also included Dashiell Hammett that year. When Dorothy received notification of the award in a letter from Malcolm Cowley, then president of the Institute, she failed to acknowledge it for some reason. After friends advised her that it was proper to send a formal letter of acceptance, she felt mortified and immediately wrote to Cowley claiming that she had been “in a state of euphoric stupefaction, never pierced by the idea that I should have answered.” She wanted him to have her official reply, which was “Mr. Cowley—Good God, yes!” The award, incidentally, gave a cash prize of a thousand dollars.

At the awards ceremony, Cowley read a glowing citation that had been composed by Lillian Hellman:

To DOROTHY PARKER, born in West End, New Jersey, because the clean wit of her verse and the sharp perception in her stories have produced a brilliant record of our time. Because Miss Parker has a true talent, even her early work gives us as much pleasure today as it did thirty years ago.

Then, Cowley recalled, an unusual reaction took place. “In 1958 standing ovations were not yet a common occurence. I think there had never yet been one at an Institute Ceremonial. But when Dorothy Parker received her award, the whole audience rose spontaneously as if to prove that, yes, they remembered her work with pleasure. I saw men and women in the audience wiping away tears.”

As a result of the Waite award, Dorothy became acquainted with Elizabeth Ames, who had established the prize in memory of her sister. Ames, eager to help Dorothy, arranged still another honor, an invitation to Yaddo, the four-hundred-acre haven for artists, writers, and composers that she administered near Saratoga Springs, New York. Since 1926, Yaddo had patronized American arts and letters by operating a sort of sleep-away camp. Its impressive list of alumni included Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, and Aaron Copland, who, among many others, had accomplished important work there. It was hoped that Dorothy would do likewise. While she felt honored, she soon discovered that accepting an invitation to Yaddo presented problems that she had not bargained for. An all-expense-paid exile in the country did not affect her obligation to pay rent at the Volney and, worse, Yaddo did not welcome dogs. Not only would she have to board her current poodle, Cliché, so named because “the streets are carpeted with black French poodles,” but she also would be separated from her pet, a far more serious hardship.

To stall Elizabeth Ames, she said that an autumn residence would do just as well as a summer one. “My driving idea is work,” she wrote, “and I do so want an unbroken stretch of it, up there.” She could not resist rubbing Ames’s nose in the matter of the ban on dogs. “Fortunately, I know of a place where she [Cliché] has been, when I have to be away, and she has been well and happy there.” She went on to offer a detailed description of the Connecticut kennel—its floor plan, menus, physical-fitness program. Of course, she reminded Ames, no kennel could provide what dogs wanted most, which was “affection. Well, you know—just like two-legged people.”

The day came when Ames could be put off no further. In September 1958, Dorothy arrived for a two-month stay. She found Yaddo pretty much as advertised: a stone Victorian mansion flanked by woods, a daily routine during which no resident was to be interrupted, and a black metal lunch pail outside her door. In this setting, supposedly idyllic for productivity, she realized at once that she would be devoutly bored. The rustic silence was unnatural. Her writer’s block was invigorated by the country air. The place was filled with the kind of self-conscious, pretentious writers she crossed the street to avoid. Morton Zabel, an English professor from the University of Chicago, was an exception. He struck her as having a fairly decent sense of humor. Sometimes she and Zabel would put their heads together to exchange observations about some of the guests, particularly a pair of hoity-toity young women whose artistic airs had already begun to grate on her nerves.

After Zabel returned to Chicago and Yaddo was drenched by cold autumnal rains, the estate became soggy and unbearably gloomy. She stayed in her room, pleading illness. “The two young ladies are still here,” she reported to Zabel, “and I doubt if you could notice any change in their manners and ways—you might think, though, that they have got rather more so. There are two new arrivals, scraped from the bottom of that barrel, and I rather think that my illness that has kept me to my room was not entirely due to germs.” In November, when her time ran out, she was overjoyed to escape Yaddo. “I can only say it was good to get back from the dreary wet days and the dreary wet people at Yaddo,” she wrote Zabel once she was safely back at the Volney and reunited with Cliché. It was amazing that she lasted two months.