Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (66 page)

Dorothy resigned herself to Lillian’s restrictions. If Lilly sometimes treated her as if she were practically toothless, she managed to overlook that too. Over the years, their friendship had undergone considerable evolution as their importance in the world had somersaulted. Now it was Hellman who glittered as a literary big shot surrounded by sycophants, her bank balance bursting with the fruits of success, while Dorothy stood hungrily in the shadows.

In the early fifties, Hellman wrote a short story, a clear invasion of Dorothy’s province, and presented it to her for an opinion. She hastened to praise the story highly—perhaps too highly Hellman suspected—and singled out one particular phrase as having special merit. Hellman thought she was pulling her leg. Some months later, visiting Hellman’s farm in Pleasantville, New York, she inquired what had become of the story. It was pedestrian, Hellman replied. Dorothy quickly disagreed—it was original and sensitive, in her opinion. As she was saying this, she stumbled over the puppies they had brought along on their walk. Stooping to make sure the dogs were not hurt, she heard Hellman say that God must be dispensing justice by punishing puppies for the lies certain people told their friends. When Dorothy continued to insist that she really did like the story, Hellman walked on.

In silence, they continued to a lake where Hellman intended to inspect some traps that had been set for snapping turtles. Hauling a trap out of the water, she placed it on the ground and they stared at the turtle. His penis, they could see, was erect with fear.

Dorothy pinned on a catlike smile. She said prettily, “It must be pleasant to have sex appeal for turtles. Shall I leave you alone together?” Having paid her back, Dorothy was content to drop the matter.

She enjoyed her invitations to Hellman’s house at the Vineyard, where the sight of the sea and the beaches transported her back to her earliest days in West End. Her apartment lacked air-conditioning and got miserably uncomfortable in summer. The only problem with staying at the Vineyard was Hammett’s dislike of her, an antipathy that had grown more pronounced over the years so that he refused to be around her. When her visits coincided with his absence, everything worked out fine. When they did not, Hammett stubbornly moved out of the house and made sure he did not return until after she had gone back to New York. In the summer of 1960, a few months before he died of lung cancer, leaving was impossible and Hellman told Dorothy that she would have to stay in a guest house down the road. She was not forthright about the reason for this odd arrangement, but it was not difficult to figure out the truth. In the evenings, after Hammett had fallen asleep, Dorothy was invited to join Hellman for dinner, Hellman’s second supper because she had already pretended to eat from a tray in Hammett’s room. That August, Dorothy never saw Hammett once. Out of tact, she asked no questions.

What Hellman wanted, in payment for her kindness to Dorothy, was a seemingly easy favor—for anyone but Dorothy. Hellman wanted to be the sole exception to Dorothy’s habit of belittling people behind their backs. As the years went by and Hellman surrounded herself with apple-polishers, she eventually convinced herself that there were two people about whom Dorothy had never made an unkind remark: herself and Robert Benchley. This fantasy was reinforced by those who wished to get on her good side. The truth was, Dorothy’s nature caused her to abuse everyone except the Murphys. Although she said nothing derogatory about Benchley after his death, she had not spared him during the thirties and forties. She also poked fun at Hellman. She even did it to her face whenever she thought she could get away with it, but Hellman was determined to ignore this.

Her feelings of closeness to people who had suffered for their political beliefs—friends like Hellman, the Mostels, the d’Usseaus—emerged at the expense of certain other old friendships. No longer did she see much of Harold and Alice Guinzburg, and she also began avoiding Sara and Gerald Murphy. “To be anti-Communist,” Gerald observed to Sara, “is to be anti-Dottie, apparently. Too bad.” If the Murphys were far from being militants, they did happen to be liberal Democrats who believed that actors and writers were “rather poor prey” for congressional investigators. During Lillian Hellman’s unsuccessful attempt to have Hammett released on bail after his arrest, Gerald emptied the Mark Cross safe of its receipts for that day and added a personal check to make a total of ten thousand dollars.

Dorothy kept Sara and Gerald at a distance. Whenever she communicated with them, which was not often, she behaved as if nothing had changed. She liked to send amusing items clipped from newspapers. Once it was a “Dear Abby” column about a couple named Dorothy and John who were celebrating fifty years of marriage but fought like tigers at their golden anniversary party. Dorothy pasted the clipping on a sheet of Volney stationery, titled it “TOGETHERNESS!” and added a few tidbits of personal information: “I have been having lumbago. Oh, my God—I have a little poodle named Cliché. I love the Murphys (the last item is not new).” Even allowing for her aversion to letter writing, this piece of mail spoke volumes about the rift that had developed, and it saddened the Murphys. Somehow Dorothy contrived to ignore everyone’s feelings, including her own. To acknowledge that an estrangement had taken place would have been too painful.

Living at the Volney had serious disadvantages when she wanted privacy. Simply to venture outside could be so tricky that Dorothy developed a self-protective maneuver. If she was walking down Madison Avenue and noticed someone she knew coming toward her, she stopped at a shop window and stared fixedly at some object until the person passed by. She cut many an old friend this way. Some people decided that her desire for privacy had to be respected, others concluded that she had become a hermit. Explained an acquaintance of thirty years, “I guess she didn’t want to stand on the street and pass a lot of polite gas with me.”

Attacking either The New Yorker or the Round Table was now practically an avocation of hers. When given the opportunity, she happily announced that the cartoons were still wonderful but that the fiction had gone downhill abominably. The proof was that stories these days always seemed to be tedious accounts of the author’s childhood in Pakistan. At a party given by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams, she got to talking with James Geraghty, the magazine’s art editor. Under the circumstances it would have been politic to keep her mouth shut, but her tongue ran away and she proceeded to give Geraghty a complete airing of her views. He listened with equanimity. There was, she wound up tauntingly, no real wit in The New
Yorker
anymore.

This last crack proved too much for Geraghty. “You mean like ‘Men never make passes at girls who wear glasses’?” he retorted.

“You son of a bitch!” she hurled back, probably as much annoyed by his misquoting of her verse as his recollection of it.

She rued the day she had written “News Item” and wished she had the power to destroy it. It was “a terrible thing to have made a serious attempt to write verse and then be remembered for two lines like those.” It also made her bilious the way the same old jokes were quoted whenever anyone wrote about her. She told Tallulah Bankhead that she must “even by accident, have said other things worth repeating, if the lazy sons-of-bitches bothered to find out.”

Having once begun to embrace hardship, she elevated necessity to a principle and then martyred herself over it. She was hard up but not quite as broke as she pretended. Nevertheless, she continued to simplify her existence by paying strict attention to nickels and dimes and never going to Lord & Taylor or the Chemical Bank if she could help it. She conducted banking at her favorite liquor store, which was agreeable about cashing checks. Without neo-Puritanical Hellmans or d’Usseaus keeping her on a tight rein, she arranged her days to suit herself. She read books for Esquire, labored over her column, and occasionally accepted invitations to read from her writings at universities or at the Ninety-second Street YMHA, where they paid a tidy hundred and fifty dollars. Her stage fright had remained incurable. Once, before going on stage to speak before a woman’s group, she exclaimed, “Oh shit, what am I doing here!” She also made two long-playing records of her verse and fiction.

During these years she seldom saw Alan, who was living in Hollywood, but she continued to receive news of him from friends. He had a small amount of royalty income from his investments in Mister Roberts and South
Pacific,
Joshua Logan’s Broadway hits. He managed a tour that the Welsh actor Emlyn Williams made of New Zealand, but beyond this he had no visible means of support. Often he had to live by his wits, aptly and sadly described by a friend as “living on the kindness of friends.” When he was short of money, he stayed at his mother’s house in Bucks County, usually when Horte was in Richmond, or he visited his friend Betty Moodie and her family in Erwinna. Sought after as a weekend guest, he became the unattached man that hostesses needed to round out the numbers at dinner parties. “He was a terribly witty, amusing man,” said Betty Moodie. “It was pathetic but when things got tough there was no doubt that he traded on those qualities just to get by. He would play bridge and be an entertaining companion. He was staying at my place once and I remember him saying that he had to go up to Tallulah’s for the weekend.” Weekend visits also were made to the home of Robert Sherwood’s widow, Madeline, who sometimes gave him discarded clothing—expensive outfits that he passed on to women friends. Often he was heard to remark that he wished Dorothy would stop drinking, or that he was trying to get her off the booze. “It was clear,” Moodie said, “that he wasn’t going to get any work without her.. She had resources if she could pull herself together but he had none.”

If Alan was reduced to trading on his likeability in order to live, he displayed little of this charm around Dorothy when they met. He usually had a chip on his shoulder. She would make what she believed to be a perfectly ordinary remark and he would become antagonistic (or vice versa) and they wound up quarreling. The sight of Dorothy’s apartment displeased him. After a visit to the Volney, he told friends that she was living wretchedly, that he had found her wallowing in filth, and that the dog had littered the carpet.

His quickness to take offense and to belittle her made Dorothy wary about seeing him. The strain of meeting also made him uneasy. Late one night, he stopped by unannounced and brought along a casual acquaintance, Wyatt Cooper. They had run into each other earlier at a party at the home of George Kaufman and his actress wife, Leueen MacGrath, who was a friend of Alan’s. Recently returned from London, Alan and Kaufman had coauthored a musical called The Lipstick War, a surprising collaboration because Kaufman had never particularly liked Alan—nor had he made a secret of his dislike. The Lipstick
War
was never produced, but that night Alan felt optimistic.

It was late. Since she had been expecting no visitors, Dorothy looked disheveled, and the apartment was cluttered with dog toys on the sofa and soiled newspapers where Cliché had relieved herself. More embarrassing to Dorothy, she had finished every drop of liquor and had nothing to offer guests. After apologizing for her lack of hospitality and the condition of the apartment, she could think of nothing further to say and clammed up. Wyatt Cooper felt immensely uncomfortable and stood around with a frozen smile on his face. The scene, he later wrote, struck him as unreal. “Loneliness and guilt were almost like physical presences in the space between them, and they spoke in short, stilted, and polite sentences with terrible silences in between, and yet there was a tenderness in the exchange, a grief for old hurts, and a shared reluctance to turn loose.”

When all conversation petered out, Alan and Cooper finally took their leave.

Chapter 18

HAM AND CHEESE, HOLD THE MAYO

2941-1964

In the spring of 1961, she agreed to join Alan in Hollywood. Unwilling to acknowledge any reconciliation, she characterized the trip as strictly business, because that was the level on which she wished to keep it. After two decades, they had been offered the chance to work together again. Their long-time friend Charles Brackett, now head of Twentieth Century-Fox, ignored Dorothy’s blacklisting and decided to hire them for an adaptation of a French stage play. More precisely, Alan had sought the job and was told he could have it but only on the condition that he send for Dorothy. The Good Soup was not much of a play, but Fox intended the property for its biggest star, Marilyn Monroe. No doubt, this tantalizing bait tempted Dorothy, for she greatly admired Monroe’s beauty and sensitivity. At the same time, she was understandably apprehensive about involving herself with Alan. Not only did it mean uprooting herself from a carefully constructed independence, but also it entailed leaving New York for a place she had always disliked and did not want to be, for a man from whom she had grown apart. Even on a temporary basis, the prospect had its disturbing aspects.