Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (73 page)

The few personal papers, documents, or mementos that she left behind were to vanish, destroyed either when the apartment was cleaned or at some later date. As Martha Gellhorn wrote in 1981, Dorothy “might as well have left her papers to Fort Knox. Until Miss H. releases Mrs. Parker’s papers, there is no way to prove how long Miss H. stayed in Spain [during 1937].”

Nothing was released. After Lillian Hellman’s death in 1984, no material relating to Dorothy was found among her possessions.

Dorothy outlived nearly all the Round Tablers except Marc Connelly and Frank Sullivan. A few days after her death, Sullivan wrote to a friend,

I could write you so much about Dotty that I don’t dare get started. Jim Cagney telephoned today from Milbrook in a mild state of shock about her death. He said he just wanted to make sure I was here, as a link with former and happier days. Well, it threw me into a pensive shock too. Her departure is as much the end of an era for me ... as the departure of the bulk of the NY papers. She was a strong person, Honey. And you said it, when you wrote: she was at war with herself all her life. Maybe most of us are and some negotiate cease fires occasionally, which seldom last. All the digs she took at people, friend and foe alike, were really digs at herself....

If there is any meaning to anything, she is now having the good time she seldom had while here, and I hope she is having it with Mr. Benchley (her name for him always).

AFTERWORD TO THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Nobody seems to have noticed that Dorothy Parker died in 1967. Maybe this is because every time you turn around she is either being quoted or misquoted, when someone is not setting her verse to music or adapting one of her stories for a one-act show. In the twenty-first century, she has become a brand name with her own literary society and one of the most impressive Web sites of any major writer.

Over just the past two decades, in death as in life, she’s experienced her share of successes. The United States Postal Service honored her with a commemorative stamp in 1992. Madame Tussauds wax museum in New York exhibited a life-size statue, and Hollywood, a place where she once worked and thereafter deeply loathed, decided to film her life (
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
, 1994), at least the juicy parts. And, when a new edition of her collected work,
The Portable Dorothy
Parker,
was published last year in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, a crowd of well-wishers threw a book-launch party at the Algonquin Hotel, exactly the fabulous event that lots of living writers would envy. Clearly, just because she has been gone forty years doesn’t mean she isn’t having fun, for a person in her condition.

These days, about the only things she no longer does are television appearances. However, as befits a veteran celebrity, she continues to make news. Signatures are being collected to honor her with a street sign, DOROTHY PARKER WAY, on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 44th Street. In her hometown, visitors who want to view her favorite Times Square haunts have a chance to take walking tours or consult a lavishly illustrated travel guide devoted to Dorothy Parker’s New York. On West 44th Street, where the Algonquin still pays tribute to its patron saint, they can book the Parker suite (typically $499 a night). The hotel dining room allows guests to sit at a facsimile “Round Table” and order the “Dorothy Parker Burger,” even wash it down with a “Dorothy Parker” cocktail (Smirnoff vodka, Chambord liqueur, and fresh lemon juice).

Meanwhile, Parker is booming in cyberspace: memorabilia enthusiasts log onto
www.dorothyparker.com
and shop for a variety of merchandise, including T-shirts and coffee mugs, a phenomenon that no doubt would dumbfound Mrs. Parker, a lifelong collector of nothing.

Another subject that fascinates people is the whereabouts of her ashes, which were stowed in a Wall Street filing cabinet for fifteen years. Her executors (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) interred the ashes in a memorial garden at their Baltimore headquarters in 1988, but her remains are due to move again.

Not only do readers continue to enjoy her work, they also snap up practically anything having to do with her life. There is obviously no shortage of possibilities. But why do people still care about a five-foot depressed, alcoholic, wisecracking nineteenth-century New Yorker who took wicked pleasure in making fun of just about everything? Presumably it’s because discretion was never her forte. A virtuoso of satire, she has been ranked with Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin as an astute observer of life, love, and the glorious stupidities of her fellow citizens. As such, she may never go out of style.

Despite her reputation as a brilliant wit who fired off memorable one-liners, her reality was far more complex: a lifetime of hard labor turning out verse, short stories, literary and dramatic criticism, essays, war reporting, song lyrics, dramas, and screenplays. Her output was vast, her subjects wide-ranging—from suicidal blondes and perfect roses, to union organizing, fascism, and the Spanish civil war. She has the distinction of being the only American writer to have bequeathed her estate—and the whole of future royalty earnings—to a civil rights group, the NAACP. There was nothing witty about that.

If Dorothy Parker’s life was cluttered with “laughter and hope and a sock in the eye,” as she once wrote, her afterlife has been crowded with plenty of action-packed adventures. How she would have hated missing it all.

—Marion Meade October 2006

Notes

Introduction:
The
Algonquin
Hotel

xvi
THEY
SAY OF ME: Parker, “Neither Bloody nor Bowed,”
The Portable
Dorothy
Parker, The Viking Press, 1973, p. 117.

xvii I AM
CHEAP: Edmund Wilson, The
Twenties,
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975, p. 345.

xvii BUT NOW I KNOW: Parker, “Indian Summer,”
The Portable Dorothy Parker,
p. 107.

xvii TIME DOTH FLIT: Author’s interview with Allen Saalburg.

xvii SHE DISDAINED: Parker, The
Portable
Dorothy
Parker, p. 491.

xvii AT TWILIGHT:
Author’s interview with
Allen
Saalburg.

xviii THREE HIGHBALLS: Parker, “Just a Little One,” The
Portable
Dorothy Parker, p. 242.

xviii I DON’T CARE: Parker, “Morning,” Life, July 7, 1927, p. 9.

xviii IT WAS INEVITABLE: Parker, The
Portable Dorothy
Parker, p. 483.

xviii AT LUNCH: Parker, The Portable
Dorothy Parker,
p. 510.

xix OH, HARD IS THE STRUGGLE: Parker, “Coda,” The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 240.

xix JUST A LITTLE JEWISH GIRL: Wyatt Cooper, “Whatever You Think Dorothy Parker Was Like, She Wasn’t,” Esquire, July 1968, p. 57.

One: The Events Leading Up to the Tragedy

3 WILD IN MY BREAST: Parker, “Temps Perdu,”
The Portable Dorothy Parker
, p. 317.

3 MY GOD: Cooper, p. 57.

5 FOLK OF MUD: Parker, “The Dark Girl’s Rhyme,”
The Portable Dorothy Parker
, p. 78.

8 WHAT STREET: Parker, McCall’s, January 1928, p. 4.

9 GO DOWN TO ELLIS ISLAND: Cooper, p. 57.

9 THE GREATEST SALESMAN:
Crerand’s
Cloak Journal, February 1899, p. 146.

10 SILLY STOCK: Parker, “The Dark Girl’s Rhyme,” The Portable
Dorothy
Parker, p. 78.

11 LOVELY SPEECH: Author’s interview with Ruth Goetz.

12 DIARRHEA WITH COLIC: State of New Jersey Report of Death, Eliza Rothschild, July 20, 1898.

12 PROMPTLY WENT AND DIED: Cooper, p. 57.

13 I DIDN’T CALL: Ibid.

14 WHENEVER HE’D HEAR: Ibid.

14 WOULD LAUGH: Parker, “Condolence,” The Portable
Dorothy Parker,
p. 93.

14 DO NOT WELCOME ME: Parker, “The White Lady,” The
Portable
Dorothy Parker, p. 90.

15 SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION: Cooper, p. 57.

15 THEY WEREN’T EXACTLY: Ibid.

15 EIGHTY YEARS LATER: Laura McLaughlin letter to author, February 25, 1980.

15 DID YOU LOVE: Cooper, p. 57.

16 THAT YOUR SISTER?: Ibid.

16 A FOUNTAIN PEN: Parker, Ainslee’s, October 1921, p. 156.

16 THERE’S LITTLE: Parker, “Coda,” The Portable
Dorothy
Parker, p. 240.

17 SUCH ARTICLES OF JEWELRY: Eleanor Rothschild will.

Two: Palimpsest

19 SHE WAS A REAL BEAUTY: Cooper, p. 57.

20 ONE OF THOSE AWFUL CHILDREN: “Dorothy Parker,” in Writers
at
Work: The Paris Review
Interviews,
Edited by Malcolm Cowley, The Viking Press, 1957, 1958, p. 76.

20 WONDERFUL TO SAY: Helen Rothschild letter to Henry Rothschild, July 25, 1905.

20 THIS MORNING RAGS: Henry Rothschild untitled verse, 1905.

21 DO NOT FAIL: Ibid.

22 FOR COMFORT: Writers at Work, p. 78.

22 LYING ON HIS FACE: William Thackeray, Vanity Fair, p. 347.

22 THEY SAY WHEN YOUR: Dorothy Rothschild letter to Henry Rothschild, August 6, 1906.

22 A SOCK IN THE EYE: Parker, “Inventory,” The Portable
Dorothy
Parker, p. 96.

23 THE KID IS FINE: Helen Rothschild letter to Henry Rothschild, ca. July, 1905.

23 DEAR PAPA: Dorothy Rothschild letters to Henry Rothschild, Summer 1905.

24 SAY, MISS DOROTHY: Henry Rothschild untitled verse, Summer 1905.

25 ONE CAME IN HANDY: Dorothy Rothschild letter to Henry Rothschild, August 22, 1905.

25 IT’S TERRIBLY HOT: Ibid., June 23, 1906.

26 DEAR PAPA: Ibid., June 26, 1906.

27 THE TYPICAL DANA CIRL: Parker, “The Education of Gloria,” Ladies, Home
Journal,
October 1920, p. 37; “The Middle or Blue Period,”
The Portable Dorothy Parker
, p. 595.

28 CARRIED THE DAISY CHAIN: “Theatre,”
The New Yorker
, February 28, 1931, p. 22.

28 BECAUSE OF CIRCUMSTANCES:
Los
Angeles Times, April 28, 1963.

28 THE BLACK SHEEP: “Nobody knew what happened to him,” Lel Droste Iveson said of her uncle, Harry Rothschild. In “The Wonderful Old Gentleman,” Parker drew the character of a scapegrace who had disappointed his father, despite everything he had done for the boy. The Old Gentleman “used to try and help Matt get along. He’d go down, like it was to Mr. Fuller, that time Matt was working at the bank, and he’d explain to him, ‘Now, Mr. Fuller,’ he’d say, ‘I don’t know whether you know it, but this son of mine has always been what you might call the black sheep of the family. He’s been kind of a drinker,’ he’d say, ‘and he’s got himself into trouble a couple of times, and if you’d just keep an eye on him, so’s to see he keeps straight, it’d be a favor to me.’ ” Matt’s wild behavior, Parker wrote, “had a good deal to do with hastening father’s death.” The
Portable
Dorothy Parker, p. 61.

29 MARTIN, SHE SAID: Surrogate Court, County of New York, “In the Matter of Proving the Last Will and Testament of Martin Rothschild, Deceased,” May 17, 1912.

29 THREE NIGHTS LATER: Henry Rothschild’s death certificate lists the cause of death as “chronic endocarditis—chronic myocarditis—genera arteriosclerosis.”

30 AFTER MY FATHER DIED : Writers at Work, p. 72.

31 THE MOST HORRIBLE: Fred Lawrence Guiles, Hanging On in Paradise, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1975, p. 87.

31 VERY NICE LIGHT VERSE: Parker, “Sophisticated Verse” speech, American Writers Congress, June 1939.

31 THERE IS NO WAY OF KNOWING: If F.P.A. published any of Dorothy’s early verse in The Conning Tower, there is no way to distinguish her work from that of other contributors.

32 MY HUSBAND SAYS: Dorothy Rothschild, “Any Porch,” Vanity Fair, September 1915, p. 32.

32 DOROTHY’S FIRST MEETING WITH FRANK CROWINSHIELD: Frank Crowninshield, “Crowninshield in the Cub’s Den,” Vogue, September 15, 1944, p. 197.

33 BUT HOW WILL WE EVER: Helen Lawrenson, Stranger
at
the Party, Random House, 1975, p. 57.

33 IF TO YOUR PAPA: Henry Rothschild untitled verse, ca. 1906.

34 I THOUGHT: Writers at Work, p. 72.

Three: Vanity Fair

35 FROM THESE FOUNDATIONS: Vogue Pattern Service, October 1, 1916, p. 101.

35 THERE WAS A LITTLE GIRL: Caroline Seebohm,
The Man Who Was Vogue
, The Viking Press, 1982, p. 60.

36 A SMALL, DARK-HAIRED PIXIE: Edna Woolman Chase and lika Chase, Always in Vogue, Doubleday & Co., 1954, p. 135.

36 IN THE WOMEN’S WASHROOM: Crow. ninshield, p. 197.

36 WE USED TO SIT AROUND:
Writers at
Work, p. 72.

37 I HATE WOMEN: “Henriette Rousseau” (Dorothy Rothschild pseudonym), “Women: A Hate Song,” Vanity Fair, August 1916, p. 61.

37 FIRST AND SECOND: Dorothy Rothschild, “Why I Haven’t Married,”
Vanity
Fair, October 1916, p. 51.