Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (72 page)

In Salisbury’s judgment, Cisney’s idea was worth pursuing and encouraging. When she brought her to the Volney to read the script, Dorothy could not have been more “delighted” and gave the project her enthusiastic endorsement. She particularly liked the thought of Julie Harris as her prototype. As the months passed and the details were worked out, Dorothy’s excitement mounted. Cisney planned to open the show at Ann Arbor’s 1967—1968 season, give Dorothy one thousand dollars in advance royalties, and then negotiate a Dramatists Guild contract for a Broadway production. In the meantime, she asked Dorothy to attend rehearsals in Ann Arbor and offer suggestions.

The prospect of a Broadway show buoyed her spirits. She also hoped that it might alleviate her money worries. Lately she had been thinking about the future, wondering how she was going to conserve her nest egg. The result of her stewing was a decision to move to a smaller, cheaper apartment on the sixth floor. This meant a savings of twenty-five dollars a month, but having made the switch she immediately regretted it. The new apartment was not nearly as pleasant as 8E.

For a while that winter she went out frequently. Friends took her to see
Sherry
, a Broadway musical based on
The Man Who Came to Dinner.
Afterward, they went to the Oak Room at the Plaza, where she held court and was delighted to be spotted by Broadway columnist Leonard Lyons. That sort of adventure happened rarely. More often she spent quiet times with Sara Murphy or evenings at Bea Stewart’s apartment six blocks away. A color snapshot taken by Bea showed that Dorothy liked to dress up for these outings. She wore a smart navy blue dress, and her hair and makeup had been obviously done with care. As always, her poodle was seated on her lap. Evenings at Bea’s customarily ended with Dorothy’s opening her purse and making a woebegone face. She had no change for a cab. The ritual would end with her accepting a dollar or two.

Even though she felt energetic, she continued to grumble about her terrible life. She was as good as dead. “I can’t write, I can’t write,” she would moan. When it was proposed that she might want to reminisce about her life by dictating the story to Wyatt Cooper, she surprised everyone by agreeing. It would give her, she said, “something to live for,” and she assured Cooper she would keep the narrative “gay”; otherwise there would be no point in telling it. The tapings were, in fact, somewhat of a strain. After three sessions, they gave up the project. Possibly Dorothy found them fun because she had an opportunity to demolish her father and practically every other human being whose path had crossed hers, but Cooper derived little satisfaction. Unable to accept her stories as the truth, he concluded that the recollections had to be “creative exaggerations.”

In March, Gloria and Wyatt Cooper gave a party in her honor. This resulted from her having missed an earlier invitation, when a blizzard had dumped a foot of snow on the city and she had been unable to navigate the storm. Aware of her disappointment, the Coopers proposed a special party for her and promised to invite glamorous, interesting people whose company she would enjoy.

“My wife,” wrote Cooper, “was, of course, fascinated by Dottie, and somewhat worshipful, an attitude that was mutual.... Dottie was always at her most genteel in my wife’s presence, with malice toward none and charity for all.” It was true that her manner toward Gloria Vanderbilt could not have been more conventionally correct, as it would have been with any of the socialites whose lives she followed in
Women’s Wear Daily
and ripped to shreds with such relish. Gloria’s rather imperious manner made her smile. She had taken to calling her “Gloria the Vth.”

In the following weeks, invitations were extended to a dozen couples, including Mr. and Mrs. William Paley, Mr. and Mrs. Louis Auchincloss, Mr. and Mrs. Gardner Cowles, and Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Peabody, among other notables. None of Dorothy’s friends were asked.

“Have you been invited?” Dorothy demanded of Parker Ladd, who happened to be a friend of both hers and the Coopers.

“No,” he answered, he had not.

“Well, I’m not going either,” she swore. “Those are just not my kind of people.”

In reality, nothing could have prevented her acceptance. What troubled her was having nothing to wear, at least nothing worthy of such a fine occasion. When the Coopers realized this, they quickly provided a suitable costume. Gloria Vanderbilt sent over a size-three gold-brocade caftan beaded with tiny pearls. Dorothy found it enchanting. Even though the dress was six inches too long, she refused to have it shortened, because she thought it made her look like a Chinese empress. A last-minute crisis, the realization that she lacked matching shoes and handbag, was averted by Sara Murphy, who escorted her to Lord & Taylor to purchase accessories and then treated her to tea at Schrafft’s, a favor that did not prevent Dorothy from complaining afterward about the department store, Sara’s taste in restaurants, and the nurse who accompanied Sara everywhere.

At the Coopers, seated between Wyatt and Louis Auchincloss, Dorothy had to admit that Gloria Vanderbilt certainly knew how to give a dinner party. The display of flowers, the red tablecloths, and silver gleaming under the candlelight looked splendid. Everyone was dressed to the teeth. Dorothy studied the details of gowns, jewels, and coiffures, the better to savor and recall later for curious friends. Although she performed her part with grace and dignity, from time to time her inhibitions loosened and she let slip an unexpected remark. When another guest delivered an accolade on the beauty of the wine goblets, pointing out that wine always tasted so much better in lovely glasses, Dorothy was quick to agree.

“Oh, yes,” she fluted, “paper cups aren’t right.” It was at this moment that Wyatt Cooper, who had been finding it difficult to converse with her under these formal circumstances, was suddenly seized by an attack of nervous coughing.

On her other side, Louis Auchincloss was having a frustrating evening, because the noise at the table drowned out Dorothy’s soft voice. “I could not hear a word she said. I have never been more sadly disappointed in a social occasion in my life. I admired her so much and we could not communicate!”

To Dorothy there was little real communication with anyone at the dinner—the percussion of all that invisible money was deafening. In the days after the fete, she expressed her disdain for the whole business by verbally garrotting practically everyone present.

Bea Stewart’s telephone rang in the late afternoon on Wednesday, June 7. “She’s gone,” announced a desk clerk calling from the Volney.

Stewart took this to mean that Dorothy changed her mind about apartment 6F and impulsively moved elsewhere. But it was not that at all. Mrs. Parker died that afternoon, he informed her. A chambermaid discovered the body.

Stewart was astounded. The previous week Dorothy seemed tired, although not so tired that she stopped enjoying Scotch or Chesterfields. When Bea stopped by, she found Dorothy sitting up in bed and thought that all she needed was a rest. Never had she suspected the end was approaching.

She called the Volney back and asked them to enter Dorothy’s apartment and remove the dog. Dorothy would not want the police to impound Troy. When Stewart arrived at the hotel, the poodle was safely stored in another apartment, and the authorities were present on the scene. Dorothy lay in bed under a sheet. When Lillian Hellman arrived a short while later, she answered the medical examiner’s questions and called the newspapers—the cause of death had been a heart attack. By this time, Stewart was on her way home with Troy.

In Atlanta, Martin Luther King, Jr., was in Beaumon’s Restaurant, where his Southern Christian Leadership Conference was meeting in an executive session, when he was called to the telephone. A few minutes later he made his way back to the table and announced that Dorothy Parker had bequeathed her estate to him, “which verifies what I have always said, that the Lord will provide.” He was surprised because he had never met her. Afterward, he issued a formal statement saying that although she needed no monument to her memory, “this fine deed” could only add to her reputation. After deduction of expenses, the Parker estate amounted to $20,448.39.

On Thursday evening, at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in New York, Kate Mostel kept vigil with the body, which was laid out in the beaded caftan Dorothy had worn to the Vanderbilt-Cooper party. Mostel, raised a Catholic, thought it was awful to leave a person’s body alone in a funeral parlor. The only other person present was George Oppenheimer. They sat in silence.

Lillian Hellman took charge of the funeral arrangements with her usual efficiency. On Friday morning, a day of brilliant sunshine, there was a memorial service at Frank Campbell’s. In her will, Dorothy had requested no service of any kind, but Hellman believed in observing the amenities. In any case, it was going to be a very brief service. Among the one hundred and fifty friends who showed up to pay their respects were a number who expressed astonishment over the size of the obituary that had appeared in The New York Times. The story had begun on the front page and continued inside for almost an entire page. The paper also carried a sampling of quotes to demonstrate her “saucy wit,” some of which witticisms she had written or spoken and some of which she had not.

After a violinist played Bach’s “Air on a G String,” Lillian Hellman and Zero Mostel came forward to deliver eulogies. Kate Mostel recalled that Hellman told Zero, “ ‘You take five minutes and I’ll take five.’ So Zero took five minutes and she took twenty.” Zero Mostel tactfully pointed out that the last thing Dorothy would have wanted was this formal ceremony. “If she had her way,” he said, “I suspect she would not be here at all.” After the mourners had filed out, Sid Perelman remarked, “I’m sure Dorothy’s foot was tapping even through as short an exercise as that because she had a very short fuse.”

Many times she had rehearsed her death, imagining even the kind of weather she wanted:

Oh, let it be a night of lyric rain
And singing breezes, when my bell is tolled.
I have so loved the rain that I would hold
Last in my ears its friendly, dim refrain.

When she had written those lines she had been thirty and thinking of her mother’s death, that terrifying journey across the harbor with the coffin and standing around the muddy mound at Woodlawn. On the afternoon her own life closed it was fair and warm, with temperatures in the mid-eighties. She had never been able to get what she wanted.

In Rochester, Bill Droste and Lel Iveson read of their aunt’s death in the newspaper. Even though they had not heard from her in many years—not, in fact, since their mother died—they wished to acknowledge her passing, out of respect.

On June 9, 1967, Dorothy was cremated at Ferncliff Crematory in Harts-dale, New York. During the following weeks, her ashes remained unclaimed. Lillian Hellman, who made the arrangements, had left no instructions about their disposition. On July 16, 1973, Ferncliff finally received word to mail the cremated remains to the legal firm of O’Dwyer and Bernstien, 99 Wall Street, New York City.

Oscar Bernstien and Paul O‘Dwyer frankly did not know what to do with Dorothy’s ashes. Pending further instructions from Lillian Hellman, Paul O’Dwyer stored the box in the drawer of a filing cabinet in his office. In 1988, the NAACP claimed the ashes, which were transferred to a specially designed memorial garden on the grounds of its Baltimore headquarters.

Upon Dorothy’s death, the disposition of her business affairs and her personal effects fell to her executor. Since the only business deal in progress during the last months of Dorothy’s life was Marcella Cisney’s A
Dorothy Parker Portfolio,
Leah Salisbury wasted no time in writing to Lillan Hellman about it. To her surprise, Hellman was unwilling to extend the necessary approval. Despite appeals from both Salisbury and Cisney asking her to reconsider, Hellman steadfastly opposed the project until Cisney was obliged to drop the matter in 1970. Hellman’s attitude toward her guardian-ship of Dorothy’s and Dashiell Hammett’s estates was essentially negative. As one of her biographers later noted, she did not encourage those “who would like to keep books on Hammett and Parker, whose literary papers she keeps safely out of sight.” She refused to cooperate with anyone who wished to write about Dorothy.

In 1972, over Hellman’s fierce protests, the executorship of Dorothy’s estate passed to the NAACP. Ownership of the Parker literary property belonged to Martin Luther King during his lifetime. After his death in 1968, it was the NAACP’s position that their absolute ownership made an executor unnecessary. A court ruling in their favor terminated Hellman’s fiduciary capacity, which she had assumed was for life. She was not pleased. “It’s one thing to have real feeling for black people,” she said, “but to have the kind of blind sentimentality about the NAACP, a group so conservative that even many blacks now don’t have any respect for, is something else. She must have been drunk when she did it.”

To playwright Howard Teichmann, Hellman angrily called Dorothy “that goddamn bitch.” Hellman claimed that she had “paid her hotel bill at the Volney for years, kept her in booze, paid for her suicide attempts—all on the promise that when she died, she would leave me the rights to her writing. At my death, they would pass to the NAACP. But what did she do? She left them directly to the NAACP. Damn her!”

Hellman arranged for her secretary to be paid fifty dollars from the estate to clean Dorothy’s apartment. According to Hellman’s memoirs, “Among the small amount of papers she left were odds and ends of paid or unpaid laundry bills, a certificate of the aristocratic origins of a beloved poodle, a letter dated ten years before from an admirer of her poems, and the letter from me sent from Russia about six weeks before she died. [In fact, the only unpaid bills were from the Volney, Dorothy’s doctor, the Zitomer Pharmacy, and a newspaper delivery service, debts amounting to less than five hundred dollars.] Around the envelope of my letter was folded a piece of paper that was the beginning, obviously, of a letter Dottie never finished. It said, ‘Come home soon, Lilly, and bring Natasha on a leash. She’d be such a nice companion for C’Est Tout [Troy]. I—’ ”