Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (71 page)

She was uncomfortably aware of her own begging-bowl extended in pretend meekness. Hospital bills were a great problem, because she had no medical insurance and depended on the sudden materialization of Samaritans to bail her out. Unfortunately, Samaritans were in increasingly short supply. It became necessary for the faithful Bea Stewart to make phone calls notifying various people about Dorothy’s plight. On one occasion, after Stewart’s canvassing had produced no results, she hesitantly sought out Lillian Hellman. When Dorothy learned of it, she was furious and called Bea “a damned little meddler” who had no shame calling half of New York and describing Dorothy as “a pleading beggar.” In emergencies, Hellman was her next-to-last resort. Her final resort was The Viking Press, to which she turned in times of extreme desperation. Harold Guinzburg was dead, and the place was full of strangers, who no doubt found her more a burden than an asset as an author.

Throughout these years, her royalties from books and recordings brought in a modest income. Occasionally there would be a reprint, for example twenty-five dollars from the
Readers’ Digest
, but generally the check was so small that it hardly seemed worth a trip to the bank. Sometimes she tossed the check into a drawer and forgot about it, an old habit that used to drive Alan crazy. Some of her friends, mystified about the source of her income, speculated that she must be receiving checks from wealthy benefactors. The list of those who were assumed to have covered her expenses included John O’Hara, Quentin Reynolds, and Joan Whitney Payson. If this was true, Dorothy never acknowledged the charitable contributions. As one who had no problem taking from the rich, she was not prepared to refuse “greasy coins of pity,” but on the other hand, she saw no reason to publicize it either.

In the meantime, Leah Salisbury continued to encourage first-class producers who might successfully adapt Dorothy’s work for the stage. To represent her now, especially when she was ill or depressed, a literary agent had to be inventive. Immediately after Alan’s death, Salisbury was unsure of her address. She had been obliged to issue a firm warning that “this time I must hear from you, Dorothy,” and suggested a novel system of communication. “To make it easy for you I send you an additional copy of this letter, and a spot below marked both ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ ” Salisbury instructed her to check one and “to make the whole business still easier here is an addressed return envelope.” Dorothy had meekly penned an X next to her name and mailed back the letter. At the Volney, when she felt unwell and asked the switchboard to hold her calls, Salisbury was screened out with the rest. She left stacks of messages. After a while, feeling pressured or guilty, Dorothy returned Salisbury’s calls. It was not a particularly ideal way to conduct business, but it worked well enough.

In the spring of 1965, she began to recover and enthusiastically sent the nurse packing. For the remainder of that year and for much of the following one, she awoke in the morning feeling more cheerful than she had in a long while. Once again her name appeared in newspapers and magazines. She welcomed a reporter from the
Ladies’ Home
Journal but warned she would not discuss the Algonquin. For an Associated Press photographer, she carefully dolled herself up in her polka-dot dress and pearls, posing demurely under the shelf of Napoleon generals with Troy balanced on her lap. A story on the society page of the New York Herald Tribune described her as “a bird that has had a tough winter, but is beginning to grow new feathers.” It was true that she did feel rejuvenated. Suddenly she longed to romp in society, go to restaurants, attend new plays, even visit a discotheque. For the first time in twenty years, she made an excursion to the Algonquin Hotel, where she had made a date to meet friends. While waiting in the lobby, seated in an armchair facing the entrance to the Rose Room, she quickly drew the attention of the hotel management. Andrew Anspach came over to greet her. During their conversation, he could not resist asking her if she disliked the Algonquin because over the years she had made many derogatory remarks about the hotel. Dorothy smiled. That wasn’t the case at all, she assured him, “but it’s difficult to get terribly interested in food I digested forty-five years ago.”

About this time, she renewed her friendship with Wyatt Cooper, who was married to Gloria Vanderbilt and living in New York. One evening she accompanied them to the United Nations to hear a recital by Libby Holman. After the concert, at a party at the singer’s brownstone, Dorothy posed for photographs with Holman, Mainbocher, and Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper. In contrast to Mrs. Cooper, whose smile stretched forever, Dorothy was wearing a sour, quizzical expression, possibly reflecting her displeasure with the Coopers, who had lured her to the concert with the promise that Jacqueline Kennedy would be joining their party. The former first lady failed to show up. It turned out to be a festive evening during which many people fussed excessively over Dorothy, but her pleasure was ruined. She vented her disappointment by dressing down the Coopers for inviting her “under false pretenses.”

Equally annoying was Truman Capote’s oversight when he neglected to invite her to a ball he was planning at the Plaza Hotel, an event that the papers were billing as the party of the century. She lost no time telephoning Tallulah Bankhead to express her indignation, which Bankhead passed along to Capote. He admitted that he had forgotten to put Dorothy’s name on the guest list. Bankhead told him that was exactly Dottie’s point; she wanted to attend so that people would know she was still alive. Capote maintained that it was too late and that it would be rude to invite her at the last minute.

When a young man from radio station WBAI came to tape an interview with her, she felt extremely frisky. Richard Lamparski was just beginning a career that nostalgically chronicled the lives of celebrities past their primes. Especially adept at handling women, he captured Dorothy at her most fey by flattering her outrageously. Given an opportunity to run through her entire act, she described herself as a relic from the “long, long days ago” when she had been known as “the toast of two continents—Australia and Greenland” and professed amazement that anybody still remembered her name.

She took a liking to Lamparski, who invited her to movies at the Museum of Modern Art and entertained her with stories about the stars he met in the course of his work. When she heard that he was scheduled to visit Christine Jorgenson in the Long Island suburb of Massapequa, she expressed surprise. What on earth was Jorgenson doing in a place like Massapequa? Lamparski guessed it was because she took care of her mother, who happened to live there. Dorothy avidly pressed for more details. “Have you met her mother?”

“Not yet,” said Lamparski. “Why?”

“Because I’d be very interested in knowing what sex she is,” said Dorothy.

Having nothing better to do, she indulged her love of gossip. Apart from a desire to know what Jackie Kennedy ate for breakfast and the sex of Christine Jorgenson’s mother, she followed the doings of the rich, the famous, and the social. As a joke, someone gave her a subscription to Women’s Wear Daily, a fashion paper known for its coverage of such personages, but it was no joke to Dorothy, who devoured each issue with glee, mocking socialites such as Mrs. William Paley and Mrs. Winston Guest and calling model Jean Shrimpton “preposterous.” She found them as diverting as fictional characters and refused to listen when anybody suggested that the “Beautiful People” were not as bad as she assumed. They were as bad, she insisted; they were “idiots” who made her feel “sick” but, she said, “I love to read about them.”

Her other pastime was watching her television set, a piece of equipment she had acquired in the hopes of drowning out the nurse’s chatter—“but she talked right along with it.” Now the nurse was gone but the television remained. Even though she felt obliged to apologize for its presence, she did not in truth dislike the programs as much as she pretended. The set was going from morning to night.

The program that she claimed as her favorite was a comedy show,
That Was the Week That Was
. Her real favorites, however, were soap operas. Afternoon visitors were obliged to watch them with her or to hear about the latest episode of As the
World Turns
. Or, if she was not reporting on the soaps, it was the latest gossip about women like Barbara Paley, the “silly” jet-setters whose activities she followed.

Shallow conversation was hardly what people expected from Dorothy. Some of her friends found it extremely disconcerting. They had difficulty understanding that the hours crawled by, and soap operas helped pass the afternoons, until it was twilight and a waiter knocked on her door with the daily menu. An hour later, he reappeared bearing a tray. Even if she sent it back more or less untouched, it filled the void until she could settle down to Scotch and plotting the evening TV lineup. As she had written, if you can get through the twilight in New York, you’ll survive the night.

On the evening of her seventy-second birthday, she was invited to Sid and Laura Perelman’s Village apartment. While she enjoyed the celebration, her style was cramped because her doctor had grown increasingly tiresome about liquor, and she had meekly pledged not to touch a drop. Holding a glass of soda made her feel foolish.

“Do you know what this is?” she said to Heywood Hale Broun as she held up the glass with undisguised disgust. “Ginger ale. Isn’t that awful?”

She understood that drinking had become dangerous because it increased the risk of falls. She could afford no more of them. Her periodic resolutions to go on the wagon were always short-lived. On more than one occasion, expected at a friend’s house for dinner, she nipped into the Carlyle bar to fortify herself and forgot to come out. Several times she went too far with Scotch and found herself in Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital. Whenever visitors appeared, she politely offered them a drink, then guessed she would pour one for herself.

But one led to many. Parker Ladd believed that if he helped her empty a bottle, that would be the end of it, and she would be forced to stop for the day. One night shortly before Christmas 1965, he prepared highball after highball for them, swallowing a little of his own and dumping the rest down the sink. Finally he heaved a sigh of relief to find the bottle empty. To his amazement, Dorothy hauled herself up and began rummaging around on the closet floor among some old shoes. In triumph, she produced another bottle of Scotch. That year she spent the holiday in the hospital.

Increasingly, Dorothy’s drinking upset her friends. Ruth Goetz discovered that even an hour’s visit was “heavy going” and found herself feeling relieved when it was time to leave. Lillian Hellman only appeared when she was summoned in times of crisis, and she fled once the emergency was over. Dorothy’s alcoholism made her “dull and repetitive,” she wrote, and in any case she was unable to assume “the burdens that Dottie, maybe by never asking for anything, always put on her friends.” Dorothy pretended not to notice Hellman’s neglect. On those rare occasions when Hellman did visit, she greeted her with, “Oh, Lilly, come in quick. I want to laugh again,” instead of the reproaches Lillian was expecting. When Dorothy was on a binge, she sometimes instructed the hotel switchboard to take her calls, but more often the drinking was unpremeditated and she forgot. When Joseph Bryan telephoned to inquire how she was doing, she sounded friendly and then all at once, for no apparent reason, began to curse him as “a no-good, fascist son of a bitch.”

The world seemed to be shrinking. Few new people entered her life and the political friends she once had called “my own people” had quietly dropped from sight. Some of them would have agreed with Hellman when she later wrote that Dorothy’s eccentricities, once so amusing, had become “too strange for safety or comfort.” Dorothy tried to accept their being dead or busy or living some new incarnation. Still remaining were the Mostels and the Perelmans, whose company she continued to enjoy. The fall she returned to New York, she was greatly saddened to learn of Gerald Murphy’s death and sent Sara a telegram that simply read, DEAREST SARA, DEAREST SARA. Although Sara spent her summers at East Hampton, she kept a city apartment for the winters and now lived at the Volney with a nurse. While Dorothy saw Sara often and permitted expressions of motherly concern over her health and appetite, her closest companion continued to be Bea Stewart, who had never figured among “my own people,” who cared not two cents for politics, but who had permitted Dorothy to lean on her whenever she liked for some forty years. Bea, unlike the others, never pulled a face when Dorothy reached for the Scotch.

Around close friends she did not trouble to conceal the black moods that sometimes enveloped her, times when she needed to sound off about her many afflictions and privations. She complained to Wyatt Cooper about how she really deserved to be dead because “everybody I ever cared about is dead.” An afternoon with Fred Shroyer provoked a similar litany of small frustrations and major disasters. As he was leaving, she kissed him goodbye and whispered theatrically, “Listen, Fred, don’t feel badly when I die, because I’ve been dead for a long time.” He left feeling totally sorry for her. That bit of gallows humor was wicked of her, but she had few pleasures left in life.

In the early months of 1967, her situation looked bright. At last it seemed as if Leah Salisbury’s years of work were going to pay off in a Broadway production. Marcella Cisney, who with her husband operated a theater company at the University of Michigan, had organized a script based on Dorothy’s poems and stories as well as more recent writings from The New
Yorker
and. Cisney was a respected director who had conceived a similar production based on the poetry and letters of Robert Frost, a production that had been tried out at Michigan before its New York opening. Her production proposal for A
Dorothy Parker Portfolio
included Cole Porter’s music, sets based on the sketches of New
Yorker
artists such as Peter Arno and William Steig, and a cast starring Julie Harris and backed up by such versatile performers as Tom Ewell and Anne Jackson.