The Last Days of Dorothy Parker (12 page)

Caught in the cross-fire of Mary and Muriel, badgered for details about Julia and her wealthy family – by close friends like Blair Clark – Lilly had a hard time focusing and doled out conflicting tidbits that convinced nobody. Again, she brushed aside Gardiner's story as foolishness, blustering that it was news to her because she had never heard of the woman until a few days earlier. “She may have been the model for somebody else's Julia, but she was certainly not the model for my Julia.''
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Don't bother her; she was tired of the subject.

•

As her health problems worsened, Lilly lived in a state of volcanic rage: she barked orders at domestic help and cursed her devoted secretary Rita Wade as “a dirty Catholic son of a bitch.”
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As she departed Massachusetts General Hospital in 1983, where she had slapped nurses and thrown trays of food, the staff she had tyrannized for four months was heard to shout cheers of joy. Her hair-trigger outbursts, increasingly repulsive, alienated even the most sympathetic of friends. She was, reported William Styron, “utterly insane and loathsome to everyone, but is mercifully immobilized by her cigarette, her blindness, feebleness and venom and so can really bite no one seriously.”
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Her wild, bold side, so admired by friends and feared by others, had turned grotesque.

The final year of her life consisted largely of trying to deny her real circumstances: blindness, strokes, hallucinations, paralysis, and attacks of uncontrollable rage. For a distraction, she began collaborating on a cookbook with Peter Feibleman.
Eating Together
had to be dictated since she could no longer read or write. Many of the recipes are too old-fashioned for broad appeal, but she did a roast chicken and scrambled eggs to perfection. Strangely, some of the recipes brought back memories of Dottie, one of her few friends who had no interest in cooking. She recalled them driving to the Vineyard on a St. Patrick's Day and Dottie fulminating against the Irish with insults that were “amazing in variety and sometimes in length.”
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The more Lilly laughed, “the more remarkable grew her anger with the Irish. By the time we got to the traffic on Major Deegan Parkway, they were even responsible for Hitler's Holocaust.” After the six-hour drive, she cooked “a very good meal” of crispy roast duck and warm green beans vinaigrette.

Lilly died on June 30, 1984, ten days after her seventy-ninth birthday. Several months earlier, Peter Feibleman had visited her in New York. A nurse who stopped him to announce the approaching end warned that Hellman could no longer eat, sleep, or walk, and her memory was failing. Making his way into Lilly's room, he asked how she felt.

Wretched, she answered in irritation. “This is the worst case of writer's block I ever had in my life.”
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Up on Martha's Vineyard, following a bon voyage luncheon hosted by Rose Styron, Lilly was buried in Chilmark Cemetery. After eulogies by old friends like Patricia Neal and Jules Feiffer, after references to her as “a finished woman” by John Hersey, after Bill Styron told the mourners that he was the last person to take her out to dinner, people went back to her house in Vineyard Haven for another good-bye and more food.
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Eating together seemed appropriate.

All the while, down in Wall Street, the can containing Dottie's ashes was still stranded in Paul O'Dwyer's makeshift mausoleum. By this time, it was forgotten by everyone but O'Dwyer.

•

Three years after Hellman's death, I was preparing to deliver my biography of Dorothy Parker. Chatting on the phone one afternoon with Paul O'Dwyer, who was at his desk in his Wall Street office, I mentioned my plans to visit Parker's grave. Whenever possible, I made a point of checking out the whereabouts of a deceased subject, if for no other reason than to pay respects. After eight years, one final task remained: a trip to Ferncliff Cemetery.

“Oh, she's not there,” O'Dwyer said.

“Of course she is.” If there was one thing I knew for sure, it was where Dottie was buried.

“No, no.
I'm looking right at her
.” He had her in his office, he said, and then proceeded to explain how the unclaimed ashes had ended up in his care.

“Excuse me? Never buried?”

The truth was, he said, Mrs. Parker had been occupying his file cabinet for almost fourteen years.
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In his cabinet? Among the file folders? Good grief, hadn't he thought of a more suitable spot, say a shelf? I put down the phone and immediately began looking for a solution. My initial thought was to wonder if I might claim the ashes and arrange for a proper burial. Very likely a biographer taking possession of a subject's remains was unconventional, but these were unusual circumstances.

In any case, O'Dwyer had other ideas. Once the cat was out of the bag, he understood that something needed to be done. After
New York Daily News
columnist Liz Smith wrote about the ashes, suggestions flowed in from all over the country. Ideas ranged from the traditional to the creepy: sprinkling the ashes from an airplane, commission of an oil painting, enshrinement in one of the Algonquin's bars.

Throughout that year, O'Dwyer began discussions with the NAACP, and soon the matter was quietly resolved. It was a thoughtful decision, which, unlike some of the proposals that leaned heavily on her reputation as a drinker, would finally give her remains the respect they deserved.

On the evening of March 16, 1988, the lobby of the Algonquin was the scene of a boisterous party and press conference, swarming with Parker aficionados, newspaper reporters and TV cameras, curious hotel guests, and a sprinkling of gate-crashers hoping to cadge free wine. After all, ashes parties did not happen every day. Among the revelers was Liz Smith, who was asked to imagine what Mrs. Parker might say about the gathering. “She would have thought it was absolutely ridiculous, and, even if she loved it, she would have made fun of it.”
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Finally, the white haired, eighty-year-old O'Dwyer made his big announcement: coming to Mrs. Parker's rescue, he said, was her executor, the NAACP, who wished to give the ashes a home at its national headquarters. No planes or hotel bars for Dottie. She was going to Baltimore.

The assembled guests stared blankly. Their Mrs. Parker in Baltimore? She would rather stick a pencil in her eye.

Quickly O'Dwyer went on to introduce a graying, heavyset man, Dr. Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP, who had come up from Baltimore for the occasion. Sensible as the plan sounded, some of those present looked disappointed while others began whispering unhappily. Hooks hurried to say that he understood some might object to the NAACP getting the ashes, “not because we're not worthy but because we're not in New York.”
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This was true. Somehow the idea of Parker, a chauvinistic New Yorker, hustled off to eternity in Baltimore seemed strange.

But then came a second surprise: his organization was not content to claim Parker's ashes, but instead they planned to put up a memorial on its grounds. To many of the sophisticates milling around the Algonquin lobby, Dorothy Parker's connection to the NAACP had come as a complete surprise.

That very evening, Hooks personally bore the can to Baltimore. As he would observe afterward, “The idea of a white woman leaving her entire estate to the black cause was unparalleled. I can imagine the gesture was greeted with a raised eyebrow by many whites.”
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Although Dottie the nonbeliever wanted no funeral, she would get two of them, unusual for a nonpracticing half-Jew, half Episcopalian. Seven months later, on a gusty day in late October, Benjamin Hooks and the mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke, would bury Dottie at the NAACP national headquarters on Mount Hope Drive. As befitted a major literary figure, the ceremony dedicating the Dorothy Parker Memorial Garden was a solemn affair with speeches emphasizing her commitment to civil rights and to the traditional ties of friendship between blacks and Jews.

The vice president of the Baltimore Board of Rabbis was on hand to toss in a symbolic handful of dirt, followed by tributes to her work by a local university professor, a remembrance by Paul O'Dwyer, and three musical interludes. Missing were references to the bad old days, her dedication to the Communist Party and other unpopular activities that had led to the necessity of claiming a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

None of her friends were able to attend because nearly all of them were gone: Lillian Hellman, Sid and Laura Perelman, Beatrice Stewart, Sara Murphy, Zero Mostel. Even young Wyatt Cooper had died of a heart ailment at age fifty.

No expense had been spared in constructing the $10,000 memorial, a brick circle in a grove of nine towering white pines, designed by the dean of the Howard University School of Architecture. The inscription on the forty-pound bronze urn read:

Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) Humorist, writer, critic, defender of human and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested “Excuse My Dust”. This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind, and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people. October 20, 1988.

At long last, Dottie was laid to rest twenty-one years, seven months, and thirteen days after her death.

One thing about life, the road can go awry so easily. For a start, Dorothy Parker got cheated out of being a New Yorker. She was supposed to be one, but somebody goofed and she wound up arriving the wrong month (August), in the wrong place (by the sea some sixty miles south of New York). The family trekked back to the city immediately after Labor Day, but somehow it didn't count.

Before she knew it, she had become an adult with a ridiculous life, not kind of ridiculous but ridiculous with nuts and raisins. Chained to a desk with pencil and pad was “the worst life I've ever heard of,” she wrote in a woeful moment. Typewriters were just as terrible because she always had a problem changing the ribbon. “This living, this living, this living / Was never a project of mine.” And yet, people went on saying, “Oh, so you're a writer. Oh, that must be terribly interesting.”

“Yeah, it's a great life.”
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And to make matters worse, so very short. For her thirty-fourth birthday she registered a brief complaint:

Time doth flit.

Oh, shit!
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As life flew by, she often wished that “I was anybody but me.”
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It's hard to see around corners, however, and the name of Dorothy Parker, born Dorothy Rothschild in the last years of the Victorian era, burns bright in the twenty-first century.

Parker's writings, which have never been out of print, are available in bookstores and online, and her witticisms continue to be quoted, even those she did not originate because amateur and professional wisecrackers insist on ghosting bon mots on her behalf. Ordinarily, written humor comes with a shelf life. In contrast to beloved humorists of her generation – Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman – whose work prompts few chuckles anymore, her wit has held up amazingly well.

No question, Parker is a charismatic literary figure – she is not like anybody else – and yet the true reason for her survival is neither wit nor wisecracks; it's the work. The prose that seems so effortless is an example of the English language boiled down to essentials, divested of cliché and sentimentality. In these unadorned human stories, and in light verse, essays, and dramas, she beamed a light on her world. At the same time, however, she illuminates ours, which is why her work is still so readable a hundred years afterward.

The earliest writers to document Parker's life were Wyatt Cooper (1968) and Lillian Hellman (1969) as well as John Keats with his full-length biography,
You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker
(1970). Notwithstanding Hellman's opposition, Keats managed to interview a few key people shortly after Parker's death and deserves credit for a stouthearted basic attempt.

In 1987, building on Keats's work but lacking additional research,
The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker
was published by British biographer Leslie Frewin, whose previous subject had been Marlene Dietrich. The next year brought my biography,
Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?
(1988), which included scattered archival material, scores of interviews, and cooperation of the Rothschild family. Along with Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Edna Ferber, Parker is one of four women writers whose lives are described in
Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties
(Marion Meade, 2004). Kevin C. Fitzpatrick published a richly illustrated guidebook to the locations where Parker lived, many of the buildings still standing, in
A Journey into Dorothy Parker's New York
(2005).

The best picture of Parker's life and writings remains her collected work,
The Portable Dorothy Parker
. A pocket-size book when first compiled by Viking Press in 1944, the collection has grown to a hefty 626 pages in its third edition, revised in 2006, with the addition of letters (1905–1962) and a self-portrait, published as an interview with the
Paris Review
(1956).

In fiction, a shelf of mystery novels introduce a Dorothy Parker character as the sleuth:
The Dorothy Parker Murder Case
, George Baxt (1989);
The Broadway Murders
, first in a series of five Dorothy Parker Mysteries, Agata Stanford (2011–2012); and
Murder Your Darlings
, first in a series of three Algonquin Round Table Mysteries, J. J. Murphy (2011–2012). Unlike the mysteries, which all take place in the twenties, the most recent attempt to fictionalize Parker is set in the unlikely surroundings of present-day suburban Long Island. In Ellen Meister's
Farewell, Dorothy Parker
(2013), the heroine is a movie critic who, after inadvertently channeling Parker, becomes dependent on her as an unpaid therapist.

On the screen, Parker is the star of a feature film,
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
(1994), and
The Ten-Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table
(1987), which won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. There has been no shortage of tributes, well-deserved and wacky: the U.S. Postal Service honored her with a 29-cent commemorative stamp; the Algonquin Hotel decorated a Dorothy Parker Suite; and memorabilia marketers stocked a dozen items including bumper stickers and trucker hats adorned with her quotes.

In the end, her mismanaged arrival in the wrong state turned out rather well because New Jersey would designate her birthplace a National Literary Landmark. A bronze plaque stands at 732 Ocean Avenue, in the West End section of Long Branch, once the site of the Rothschild seaside cottage and now an apartment building.

•

Lillian Hellman is remembered as one of the most successful dramatists of the twentieth century. A giantess in the history of American theater, she wrote plays during the depths of the Great Depression that are regularly revived eighty years later. Both her jewel in the crown,
The Little Foxes
, and
The Children's Hour
have become staples of regional and community theaters.

But if Hellman's position in the theater seems honorably ensured, the same cannot be said about her controversial personal life. She left behind a reputation that continues to be the subject of debate. Since her death in 1984, six major biographies have been published, altogether some one and a half million words put to paper trying to explain who Hellman was and why she behaved as she did. Despite severe censure, she still matters.

While the operatic Hellman reveled in the spotlight, she recoiled from close examination of her private life by strangers and never fully came to terms with the fact that she was a public figure. Determined to thwart snoopers, she lamented in a 1973 interview that “in the end you can't stop biographers.”
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This realization did not stop her from trying.

One way to discourage busybodies is to leave behind as little as possible. Hellman could not bring herself to destroy much, as it turned out, because archivists at the University of Texas would toil over the processing of her papers (including a ton of banal ephemera) for years on end.

Another method of controlling information is to appoint an official biographer, a literary watchdog, who will protect an image and, not incidentally, obstruct predators seeking to root through dark secrets. As her anointed biographer, she turned to her Little, Brown editor, William Abrahams, whom she considered a friend and would make one of her three literary executors. Although he is known to have interviewed Lilly's attorney, Joseph Rauh, several times, his actual work is unclear because he died in 1998 before publishing the book. It seems possible that Abrahams never got around to writing a word.

Stationing Abrahams as gatekeeper was pointless because writers brandishing book contracts scampered right past him. The first Hellman biographers, William Wright and Hilary Mills, had begun their investigations before Hellman's death, which allowed her to embark on a letter-writing campaign asking friends to circle the wagons (and they hastened to obey). Wright, however, was a veteran who had published the lives of Luciano Pavarotti and Marjorie Merriweather Post, among other nonfiction works. Undeterred, he scrambled to round up some of his subject's deadliest enemies: Diana Trilling and Mary McCarthy, along with Hellman's former lover John Melby and attorney Joseph Rauh.

Mills, too, conducted a number of important personal interviews, for example with another of Hellman's lovers, Ralph Ingersoll, before deciding to quit. Choosing motherhood over biography, she subsequently sold some of her files (for $300) to another Hellman biographer, Carl Rollyson, who would eventually sell them (for $300) to a third biographer, Joan Mellen.

Interestingly, Hilary Mills was married to a prominent Random House editor, Robert Loomis, who had edited all but one of the books of Hellman's close friend William Styron. In addition, Hellman was particularly chummy with the subject of Mills's earlier biography of Norman Mailer and had granted an interview for the book. Apparently, these behind-the-scenes connections failed to reassure Hellman, whose guard was up.
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Within two years of Hellman's death, the first unauthorized books started to appear:

• Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman
  (1986) by William Wright is an ambitious attempt to sort out the truth and lies of a volatile life recently ended. Given the obstacles in his path, the result is critical but fair.
  
• Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy
  (1988) by Carl Rollyson is the best all-round portrait based on evenhanded analysis and scrupulous research. It was Rollyson who found the smoking gun of Hellman's Communist Party membership in the archives of her attorney. No excuses are made for Hellman's actions.
  

Wright and Rollyson were followed by four women biographers:

• Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett
  (1996) by Joan Mellen is a dual biography, basically more sympathetic to Hammett than to Hellman, which the author has described as “a critique of the Stalinist politics of Hellman and Hammett and their broader historical implications.”
  183
  The only biographer personally acquainted with Hellman, she recalls in her introduction how she twice cooked for her (roast goose, crawfish bisque, fig cake). The highboy that Hellman left Blair Clark in her will now belongs to Mellen.
  
• Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels
  (2005) by Deborah Martinson is a well-meaning effort to excuse Hellman's bad behavior. Fan-girl reverence leads the biographer to paper over transparent fabrications, especially to rationalize the memoirs as innocent fictionalizations and to suggest that the story of Julia may be real.
  
• A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman
  (2012) by Alice Kessler-Harris is an admiring historian's attempt to rehabilitate a less-than-admirable subject in an unconventional biography that takes a different approach and observes her against the circumstances of her times. However, redemption via a series of essays on aspects of Hellman's life sometimes means overlooking the lies, as well as appearing to give her an undeserved pass on charges of Stalinism.
  
• Lillian Hellman: An Imperious Life
  (Jewish Lives Series, 2014) by Dorothy Gallagher is unmistakably skeptical – at times, harsh – despite a genuine attempt at balance. Hellman impresses the author as remarkable but nonetheless “a piece of work,” with everything the term implies.
  184
  

In some ways the most convincing – and most frightening – picture of Hellman is
Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman
(1988), a memoir by her principal heir and literary executor, Peter Feibleman.

A novelization,
Lillian & Dash
by Sam Toperoff (2013), presumably aimed at readers unfamiliar with the real-life people, tries hard to transform them into lovable characters.

Hellman's life has been dramatized in film, television, and stage productions. In a one-woman show,
Lillian
(1986), she was played by Zoe Caldwell, and she is also the central character in Peter Feibleman's play
Cakewalk
(1993), adapted from his memoir.
Nick & Nora
(1991), a Broadway musical based on
The Thin Man
, survived just nine performances. In addition to the film
Julia
, there was a sympathetic television film,
Dash and Lilly
(1999), directed by Kathy Bates and starring Sam Shepard and Judy Davis. Nora Ephron's
Imaginary Friends
(2002), the story of Hellman's feud with Mary McCarthy, shows the women reunited in hell and still slugging it out.

With Hellman's death, the McCarthy lawsuit came to an end. To this day, the dust has not settled, however. The name of Lillian Hellman is associated with the statement that “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions,” even though its significance is probably no longer readily identifiable by the younger generation.
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But it is as likely as not that her name is synonymous with pathological lying and the now-famous Mary McCarthy remark that her every written word was a falsehood.

To the general public, she may be the only major literary figure within memory whose posthumous reputation is defined as much by accusations of dishonesty as by her body of work. One of her biographers, Carl Rollyson, thinks that she “might be unique in the kind of damage she did to herself.”
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Working her way back into public esteem has been hampered by several complications. For one thing, Hellman never confessed wrongdoing and of course made no apologies. Then, too, her selling image was one of moral superiority, which made the misconduct all the more unforgivable. Surely the woman who flaunted her integrity, writing that “truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels,” could not be capable of deceiving her readers.
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Or could she? To many she is perceived as untrustworthy. And yet, tarnished reputations can be turned around, and the passage of years may ultimately blur her image as a fabulist. Or at least render it irrelevant. Time will tell.