Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (68 page)

Around the neighborhood women, Dorothy did her best to maintain a regal distance. To avoid Estelle Winwood, with whom Alan had lived before he met her, she walked Cliche on the opposite side of the street. When Winwood saw her with the dog one day and called out an invitation to tea, Dorothy declined with ill-feigned sweetness. She was afraid to cross the freeway, she yelled back. Her aversion to screenwriter Hagar Wilde
(I
Was
a
Male
War Bride)
was clearly revealed when she permitted Cliché to do her business on Wilde’s lawn. Wilde turned it into a shoot-out by demanding she clean it up, which Dorothy refused to do. A tiny blonde in her fifties who owned a flock of large, aggressive cats, Wilde angrily threatened to call the police and have Dorothy arrested.

“Just who the hell do you think you are?” fumed Wilde. “The queen of Rumania? If that animal shits on my property one more time—”

“There’s no need to be tasteless, my dear,” Dorothy replied and ambled off.

After
The Good Soup
, Dorothy and Alan began to talk about writing for the stage, and she instructed Leah Salisbury to “find us a play to adapt—from the French or the Ukrianian or something. We’d love to do it.” Salisbury took her at her word. Before a week passed, she came up with an assignment to adapt the book for a musical. Just as swiftly Dorothy rejected the job: DEAR LEAH SO SORRY BUT AFTER TWO DAYS MULLING ALAN AND I DO NOT FEEL MUSIC AT MIDNIGHT IS FOR US. PLEASE HOWEVER BEAR US IN MIND FOR SOMETHING ELSE. Salisbury continued to present writing projects, but Dorothy found none of them suitable. Nina Foch recalled that “somebody at CBS was always offering her work, but she refused. She would get very grand and turn down things she could have done.” Dorothy insisted that television producers did nothing but talk because there was no contract in the end, not even “a warmly clasped hand.”

Pride prevented both her and Alan from accepting work. He too felt that he had an image to maintain. Prior to Dorothy’s arrival, he was offered an acting job by the producer of the Jack Benny television show. It had been necessary for Ralph Levy, a friend, to wheedle and cajole. Finally, Alan consented only because he thought it might be fun. On the Benny program, he had a special spot in which he sat in the audience and interrupted the show by pretending to represent the sponsor’s advertising agency. He was, according to Levy, “very, very funny. Afterward, I know, he was offered other acting jobs,” but he accepted none of them. Since his early days as a juvenile on Broadway, he associated acting with second-class citizenship.

That winter, Dorothy collected unemployment insurance and wrote for Esquire. If anyone brought up the subject of creative writing, she claimed to have run out of ideas. “Not too long ago I tried to write a story. I got my name and address on the sheet; a title, which stank; and the first sentence: ‘The stranger appeared in the doorway.’ Then I had to lie down with a wet cloth on my face.” Serious problems had developed with her teeth, which entailed a series of long, painful visits to the dentist and “as a result, I have been pretty languid the rest of the time.” Reverting to old habits, she again allowed Alan to manage their daily lives and make decisions about when to pay the bills.

In the spring, three of her short stories were performed on New York television by Margaret Leighton and Patrick O’Neal. Dramatization of “The Lovely Leave,” “A Telephone Call,” and “Dusk Before Fireworks” had been arranged by Leah Salisbury and The Viking Press. For some reason, Dorothy treated the sale with complete lack of appreciation. She told The New York Times that she knew nothing about the forthcoming production except what she read in the papers, although she supposed it had been approved by her agent, “who reads fine type in a contract the way you would a sonnet.” She went on to say that she had been troubled by financial headaches lately and resented having received no compensation for the rights to her stories.

There was not a particle of truth in this, because Talent Associates paid thirty-two hundred dollars for the rights. What made her cranky was that the money would be paid to The Viking Press and then remitted to Dorothy in her regular semiannual royalty checks, which meant that she would not see the payment for another six months. Alan, who spent a great deal of time ranting about how little income Dorothy’s writings brought in, behaved as if the customary system for distribution of authors’ royalties had been newly invented by Viking in order to persecute them. It was “awful,” he wrote to Salisbury and wondered why the Author’s League tolerated publishers who collected interest on authors’ royalties. Dorothy let him bluster and compose protesting letters to Leah Salisbury. It gave him something to do.

During this period, a number of producers expressed interest in adapting Dorothy’s writings for the stage. Most notable was Haila Stoddard, who had enjoyed considerable success with
A Thurber Carnival
, a Broadway revue based on James Thurber’s pieces and drawings, and hoped to repeat her formula with Dorothy’s material. In collaboration with director John Lehne, Stoddard arranged a half-dozen stories and a sampling of verses into a revue that she titled There Was Never More Fun
Than a
Man. To embellish the writing, she suggested including two dozen unpublished songs of Vincent Youmans. Stoddard, bubbling with enthusiasm, planned a Broadway show album and passed on to Salisbury Geraldine Page’s remark that even Dorothy Parker’s hiccups were actable. The project was beginning to sound like a winner.

When Dorothy received the completed script, however, she rejected it after a single reading. She felt so upset that she could not write to Leah Salisbury and instead dictated her reaction to Alan, who accordingly typed out a letter to the agent. Dorothy “hated” Stoddard and Lehne’s revision of “Here We Are,” its setting changed from a train to a bedroom where the newlyweds are undressing. She “hated” the additional material they had written. The closing scene in which “Dorothy” plays with a razor, nicks herself by mistake, then recites “you might as well live,” did not appeal to her either. The only part to win her approval was the idea of using Youmans’s tunes. In her opinion, it took a first-rate mind to do a skillful adaptation “and certainly neither Haila nor her collaborator has one.” She was, in truth, deeply disappointed because of all the proposals, Stoddard’s had sounded the most promising. All along she had insisted that her stories did not lend themselves to adaptation because “nothing much really happens in them.” Nevertheless, her hopes were aroused.

During the summer, she and Alan took turns wringing their hands about money and seeking scapegoats—the Jaguar, the house, the renovations. Alan loaded the Jaguar with cartons of review books, some unopened, and barreled around to the Pickwick or various other bookshops to sell them. At Shermart, he purchased the cheapest brand of Scotch and poured it into Black Label bottles. Among those growing concerned about them was Parker Ladd, West Coast editor for Charles Scribner’s. He noticed that Dorothy never seemed to spend any money. With the help of Frederick Shroyer, an English professor at California State College in Los Angeles, Ladd conceived the idea of Dorothy joining the English faculty there, perhaps succeeding to the chair recently vacated by Christopher Isherwood. At first, he said nothing to her but instead tested the idea on Alan, who reacted positively and allowed himself to be enlisted as an accomplice in the scheming that continued for some months. By the time they presented the plan to Dorothy, it was inflated into an honor so significant that to refuse would have been practically equivalent to rejecting the Nobel Prize. During the summer, final arrangements were made with the university for her to become Distinguished Visiting Professor of English. For teaching two courses in twentieth-century American and British literature, she was to receive a handsome salary of twenty thousand dollars. It seemed perfect.

In photographs taken that summer, she was radiant and laughing, her face unusually animated and her eyes girlishly flirtatious under the bangs. Seated behind a coffee table stacked with books, Cliché’s head resting in her lap, she looked lovely.

With the Cal State salary to support them, she and Alan relinquished their unemployment benefits, and now other funds began to trickle in as well. Parker Ladd arranged for her to collaborate with Fred Shroyer on an anthology of short stories for Scribner’s, a project that brought several thousand extra dollars into the Parker-Campbell bank account. Once again the Black Label bottles held genuine Black Label. Unwanted review copies were distributed to friends. Dorothy squeezed two crumpled hundred-dollar bills into the hand of a surprised Robert Rothwell and urged him to take a vacation. Despite the newfound income, she still felt poor. Ladd remembered that she continued to “bitch and complain. Clearly she loved living hand-to-mouth.”

The public lectures that she occasionally delivered on the subject of literature, for a fee of four or five hundred dollars, were also motivated by fear of poverty. Her briefest speech took place at the Monterey Public Library, where she was picketed by American Legionnaires who continued to regard her as a subversive. Some thirty of them stationed themselves conspicuously in the front rows and riveted their eyes upon her, even though they said nothing. After a few minutes, she stopped talking and stared back. Fred Shroyer, who had arranged the engagement, finally had to break the impasse by coming forward and himself speaking for another twenty minutes before declaring the evening at an end.

A student from UCLA came by to interview Dorothy for the college newspaper. Alan, dapper in silk ascot and faultlessly creased trousers, made a production of serving tea and behaved like “a friendly butler who was keeping up the pretensions of a grander era.” Lois Battle thought them a strange couple, and she could not help wondering why the sophisticated Dorothy Parker had chosen such a husband “when she must have had many more opportunities.” Dorothy, only too eager to puncture Alan’s pretensions, took delight in describing herself as “a mongrel. My father was a Rothschild; my mother was a goy; and I went to a Catholic school around the corner.” Those who wished more information about her would just have to “wait ’till I’m dead.” To Battle’s questions about politics, Dorothy reeled out provocative replies, advocating violence of thought and declaring that people who could accept injustice might as well kill themselves.

In the presence of visitors, Dorothy and Alan donned company manners: she was gracious and animated, he came across as deferential to a preposterous degree. Remarks to each other were pointedly prefaced by “dear.” Alone, they lapsed into old patterns of bickering, although the bantering tended to be gentle because they were having good times together. Dorothy likened Alan to “Betty Boop going down for the last time.”

“You are Betty Boop,” he shot back, “and as far as I’m concerned you have gone down for the last time.” Then he added playfully, “Well, it’s the end of the rainbow for both of us, I fear.”

Sometimes Alan was not amusing. One evening when they had invited Cathleen Nesbitt and Wyatt Cooper for dinner, he got unpleasantly drunk and ruined the meal. Dorothy treated him with patience and quietly offered congratulations on the delicious meal.

Her behavior could be equally embarrassing. She often spoke of wanting to meet Igor Stravinsky. Since Miranda and Ralph Levy were friends of the composer, they volunteered to arrange a special dinner party. Dorothy, recalled Miranda Levy, “had had a few nippies beforehand,” arrived at the party drunk, and doggedly refused to address more than a few mumbled words to Stravinsky the entire evening.

It was not unusual for her to become intoxicated at social gatherings, but she did not appreciate Alan doing likewise. She was uncomfortable and complained that he behaved like an old grump. He used to be fun when he drank, she said.

Her time was occupied by classes, the book with Shroyer, and her Esquire column, but Alan had nothing to do. He talked about a number of projects, including a screenplay collaboration with his friend Bill Temple-ton, and he also promised to reserve one day a week for work on the house. He wanted to convert the garage into a rental apartment. Little progress seemed to take place with any of these tasks. Much of the time he appeared to be at leisure, strolling about the neighborhood with the dogs or carting groceries home from Shermart, always wearing his pink sailor hat. Some afternoons he agreed to drive Dorothy to Fred Shroyer’s house in Monterey Park. While they discussed selections for the anthology, Alan and Shroyer’s wife Patricia passed the time playing cards. It was always Dorothy who abruptly gave the signal for their departure. “The doggies will be needing their din-din,” she said.

Usually their social life depended on Alan. If he wanted to accept an invitation, they would go out; if he felt like cooking, they would have company. Otherwise they spent quiet evenings at home with Dorothy lounging on the sofa reading, chain-smoking, and sipping Scotch. She ignored ashtrays and allowed the cigarette to burn down to her fingers before knocking off the ash. Both she and Alan had so little interest in television that they did not buy a set. They owned a stereo but seldom turned it on. Questioned by a reporter about what she did for fun, she answered, “Everything that isn’t writing is fun.”

She continued to write for Esquire, but she was finding the work grueling after four years. It was not surprising that she began to miss more deadlines than ever. Meanwhile, review copies arrived almost daily and were stacked on tables and chairs until there was no place to sit. When Alan felt energetic, he opened the packages and sorted through the books, selecting those he thought she might like and sometimes even skimming them for her.

If Arnold Gingrich once had imagined the high-forceps system to be foolproof, he now realized his mistake. It was necessary to hold forms until the very last minute. Often he obtained the column only after frantic telephoning to ask when he might expect it. “I sent it days ago,” Dorothy told him when she had not written a word. Sometimes, by skillful begging, he persuaded her to dictate a few paragraphs over the phone. Gingrich figured out that whenever she missed a month, she was apt to miss the next as well, but then the third month she might come through if he kept his fingers crossed. When he did get a column, it was good enough to excuse the absent ones. Eventually he was reduced to addressing playful letters to “Dear Dorothy Dix”: