The Last Days of Dorothy Parker (3 page)

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Before meeting Lilly, Dash had spent almost two years with Nell Martin, to whom he had dedicated
The Glass Key
. Nell was a hardworking author of some two hundred stories and a half-dozen novels, inelegant lowbrow fare to be sure but nonetheless a woman not to be confused with a prostitute. Nevertheless, in Lilly's mind, the rest of his women were bimbos and gum-cracking chippies.

The morning after the premiere of
The Children's Hour
, waking with a head-splitting hangover, she nevertheless felt triumphant and phoned Dash at his rented beach house in Pacific Palisades. The woman who answered said that she was Dash's secretary. Wasn't it an unusual hour to be calling?

The whole conversation lasted about a minute but left Lilly seething. After hanging up she remembered that the time in California was 3
A.M.
and so any woman who picked up Dash's phone in the middle of the night must be sleeping there. Because she knew of no secretary (actually, he did have one), the mystery woman could only be one of his strumpets. She was familiar with Dash's goatish sexual habits, involving both paid and unpaid partners – he once suggested a threesome, but she had the good sense to refuse.

When writing in her memoir
Pentimento
about Dash's absence and the numbing phone call, she talked about her humiliation, how she had flown to Los Angeles, rattled up blazing drunk at Dash's house, smashed a soda fountain to smithereens, then hightailed it back to the airport and caught a night flight home.

This tale of the pulverized soda fountain may or may not be true, but what is not in question is that barely three weeks after the premiere she surfaced in Hollywood, where she parked herself in Dash's $2,000-a-month hotel suite at the Beverly Wilshire.

These were heady days for Lilly. In the opinion of some critics,
The Children's Hour
was the season's outstanding play. A few months later, when the Pulitzer Prize went instead to Zoë Akins, they organized the New York Drama Critics Circle and bestowed their first award on Lilly. Impressive earnings from the play, which ran almost two years, enabled her to go hog wild and purchase a mink coat.

•

Lillian Florence Hellman, born June 20, 1905, in New Orleans, came from a Jewish family where her mother's relatives were wealthy bankers and merchants, and her father was a shoe salesman whose sisters operated a boardinghouse. The great sorrow of her life, and a source of lifelong insecurity, would be her face. Mischievous genes, or perhaps just bad luck, denied her heart's desire: ravishing natural beauty. Through no fault of her own, she was a plain child who wound up a plain young woman forced to struggle for minimal prettiness. Growing up, she winced whenever people remarked on her lovely hair, which meant “they couldn't think of anything nice to say about my face,” she recalled.
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Although deeply identified as a Southerner, Lilly actually spent half of each year in New York City, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and attended a public high school for girls. As a pampered only child, she was not shy about promoting herself, sure that she was meant for stardom despite her ordinary looks. Since then, she had continued to demand, and often got, whatever she wanted.

On the basis of her theatrical success, producer Samuel Goldwyn approached her about a movie contract and wound up offering an astonishing $2,500 a week. Not only was screenwriting a boys' club, but this kind of money in 1934 was restricted to a handful of elite writers. By point of comparison, Dottie, together with Alan, was raking in a grand total of $1,250. Lilly was not fooling herself. If she had to work on drek, her favorite word for trash, she damned well wanted to be paid handsomely.

Her first assignment was rewriting a tearjerker set during World War I, which in previous incarnations had been a Broadway play and before that a hokey silent film. To Lilly,
The Dark Angel
was “an old silly.”
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What's more, her relationship with Goldwyn got off on the wrong foot because after several weeks, impatient with endless script conferences, she stormed back to New York, a tip-off that she would not be easy to work with. Goldwyn, as big an egotist as Lilly, was not particular fond of female writers, especially prima donnas, but he recognized a go-getter who could deliver high-quality scripts. He wooed her back. When
The Dark Angel
was released in 1935, with a stellar cast led by Fredric March and Merle Oberon, reviews were enthusiastic. As debuts went, it could have been worse.

Her relationship with Goldwyn (a Polish-born glove salesman) would remain contentious, but nonetheless she ended up writing several more pictures for him, including adaptations of
The Children's Hour
(released as
These Three
, 1936) and also the play that made her name,
The Little Foxes
(1941).

In the next few years, in addition to films, she tackled the class struggle in a play about a labor strike in small-town Ohio. Without the benefit of Hammett's close supervision, she cranked out a dull melodrama peopled by cardboard characters.
Days to Come
, which opened in December 1936 and closed after just six performances, was pummeled by critics as “inept” and “muddled.”
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For Lillian,
Days to Come
was not only “an absolute horror of a failure” but a huge embarrassment.
32
She rebounded quickly, but three years would pass before she returned to the stage with the play considered to be her biggest achievement,
The Little Foxes
. Priding herself on hard-won independence, she deliberately set about constructing a reputation as a woman who stood up for herself, a no-holds-barred gunslinger whose success rested on being good at what she did. She hungered for, and accepted nothing less than, the world's admiration. In due course, she would get it.

Though success could not bring the physical beauty she craved, public recognition had its compensations, allowing her to live on a grand scale. Controlling every aspect of her life was especially important to Lilly, and yet she had no control over Dash who “always had to have things on his own terms.”
33
His most egregious betrayal was a brief fling with Laura Perelman, who with her husband Sid were close friends. For Lilly, that was particularly reprehensible. Still bitter decades later, she told a friend, “I wish he were alive, I could kill him for that.”
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Other shortcomings of his were equally worthy of mayhem. Divorced from Arthur Kober, she was free to marry, even have children. Needless to say, this scenario was the furthest thing from Dash's mind, and so a pregnancy in 1937 ended in abortion. For that matter, with their physical relationship pretty much over by 1935, the affair was running out of gas.

While they continued to care for each other, it was a narrow definition of love that excluded marriage, family, passion, and fidelity. As always, he dictated the terms of their relationship. Refusing to put himself out on her account, he made no promises to stop drinking, divorce his wife, forgo prostitutes, or avoid gonorrhea. In self-defense, she had affairs with other men. Forced to let go, at least temporarily, she was adopting Dash's cool hard-boiled style as she tried to remold herself into a she-Hammett, even if the original Hammett was not all that worthy of imitation.

In the end, however, she would get the last laugh.

(1936–1950)

Seven years before going to Hollywood, in the heat of a Boston summer, Dottie got arrested. It was an afternoon she would never forget. Wearing an embroidered sheath, strappy high heels, and white gloves, a Hattie Carnegie cloche framing her face, she looked less like a protester than a Fifth Avenue shopper on her way to Henri Bendel. When police yanked her arms on Beacon Street she refused to enter the paddy wagon, walking briskly instead to the station house. There she was relieved of her cigarettes and bundled off to a cell, and the next morning she pleaded guilty to loitering and sauntering and paid a five-dollar fine. All this happened in August 1927, and ever after, she thought of it as the proudest moment of her life.

Dottie would not get over the executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti,
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which set in motion beliefs that lasted to the end of her life. Feelings that emerged during the trial and sentencing of the Italian-American anarchists sent her to the city where she worked for the defense committee at its headquarters on Hanover Street and took part in the demonstrations on Boston Common. In a newspaper picture, she can be seen trailing John Dos Passos and singing “The Internationale” with an expression of haughty indifference to the crowds chanting “Red scum” and “Bolsheviki.” Later, Dottie gained admission to Charlestown State Prison, where she was said to have spoken to the condemned immigrants.

The executions took about fifteen minutes. In the early morning of Tuesday, August 23, Sacco was marched to the electric chair at precisely 12:11
A.M.
and pronounced dead at 12:19; Vanzetti entered the room a minute later and died at 12:26.

When Dottie got back to New York, her suite was waiting at the Algonquin, and her friends were all sitting downstairs at the Round Table cracking jokes and ordering creamed chicken and popovers, as if nothing had happened.

Nineteen twenty-seven was a good year to be an American. The most popular songs – “Let's Misbehave” and “I Wanna Be Loved by You . . . Boo Boo Bee Doo” – reflected the nation's emotions. Nearly everybody was pumped up as they watched the stock market pulse higher. Every Yankee Doodle Dandy believed in the American flag, everybody had confidence in the sanctity of Wall Street, and anybody who had a dollar invested it. Apart from money – making and flaunting it – the important thing was having fun. With all the giddy spending and cheating and carousing, the overdrafts and divorces and hangovers, nobody had time to think about trivialities and almost certainly not the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti.

By the time fall came, Dottie soon resumed her normal life, writing a book column called “Constant Reader” for the
New Yorker
and wrapping up a second volume of verse,
Sunset Gun
. In short order, she began writing one of her best stories (“Big Blonde”) and finally ended her marriage to her first husband, Eddie Parker. There was an impassioned affair with an investment banker, the epitome of a right-wing reactionary, which may or may not have inspired a few lines in Cole Porter's latest hit “Just One of Those Things.” (“As Dorothy Parker once said to her boyfriend . . .”) Calling herself a socialist, who refused to put a dime in the stock market, failed to impress her Round Table friends. To hold political views of any sort back then was unfashionable – Dottie had never voted – and besides, everybody was a capitalist.

Over the years, she never spoke of the incident in Boston again, never wrote a word of it. Poor at managing her emotions in general, she kept quiet about Sacco and Vanzetti. But in 1927, she silently had become an unregistered anarchist.

•

It was now 1935, and the unthinkable had happened. The country was unraveling, and the dream of a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage – Herbert Hoover's presidential campaign slogan in 1928 – had grown battered and broken. If the twenties had been a permanent party, the thirties was an anarchist's banquet – the unemployment rate reached a shocking peak of 24.9 percent as more and more families were forced into poverty. What seemed evident to some, among them Lilly and Dottie, was that capitalism must surely be doomed. The answer lay in profoundly different political solutions.

Speaking about herself and Dottie, Lilly liked to point out that they had absolutely nothing in common. “We were not the same generation, we were not the same kind of writer, we had led and were to continue to lead very different lives.”
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But it's no coincidence that both women were provocateurs, both understood the importance of organizing a screenwriters' union, and both were obsessed with the larger issues of capitalism and Communism and the specter of Fascism in Europe. Only in the thirties – in a place like Hollywood, an incubator of American communism – would such a serendipitous occurrence be possible, perhaps even inevitable. At another time, another place, such a friendship might not have happened. The real key to their relationship lies not in their style of living but in a likeminded obsession with politics.

In the mid-1930s, Communism seemed a panacea to some screenwriters, not merely a cure-all but a powerful aphrodisiac as well. It was better than sex. It was true love. Among the most fervent believers were Dashiell Hammett, Donald Ogden Stewart, Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson – and Dottie and Lilly. In Lilly's case, political awareness was a direct result of her affair with Hammett, a malcontent turned evangelical Marxist who joined the Communist Party in 1937. She was a member from 1938 to 1940, notwithstanding later claims to the contrary, and a Stalin supporter for the remainder of her life. There is no reliable evidence for Dottie becoming a member, although a close friend and former party member contends she was for a short time but dropped out in 1939 after the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact. Whether her membership was formal or fiction seems irrelevant because she followed the party line as fiercely as any card-carrying member, and she would one day find herself blacklisted just like the rest. (The Communist Party did not interest Alan.)

Involvement tended to be personal, and business was conducted privately. Meetings, which took place in people's homes, drew serious political organizers, but others showed up out of curiosity; and for some, the party represented a social organization, handy places to pick up dates. Screenwriter Nathanael West, who found Communism a big snooze, and its believers closet romantics, agreed to attend a Marxist study group simply to please his wife.

A decade earlier, the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti had split public opinion, as John Dos Passos sorrowfully concluded in his trilogy
USA
, “all right we are two nations.”
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In 1937, a civil war thousands of miles away – the battle for the Spanish republic against the Fascist forces of dictator Francisco Franco – rallied similar emotions. Some Americans who saw Spain as the first battle of a new world war signed up to fight with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, while others volunteered their services as doctors, nurses, and ambulance drivers.

With emotions running so high, dissension was to be expected, and people took sides. Certainly the unorthodox views of home-brewed Bolsheviks were regarded as controversial, if anything extreme, to most Americans. When Lilly claimed that she would trade her writing career in order to make a better world, the soapbox tone understandably got a rise out of James Thurber. That was, he told E. B. White, the most egotistical claptrap he'd ever heard. Dottie, another early anti-Fascist, was not quite as outspoken as Lilly. Nevertheless, she too earned a reputation as a knee-jerk radical and found puzzled friends turning against her. “She was a very, very
grande dame
, and contrariness was the wellspring of her Communism,” Beatrice Stewart told one of Parker's biographers. “She was anti. She was anti the Establishment.”
38
Bea's lack of sympathy was to be expected since her ex-husband Donald, an important screenwriter and a hotshot in the party, had left her to marry a Communist.

•

In mid-August of 1937, Dottie and Alan set sail for France with Lilly, anticipating a festive Parisian vacation. Checking into the five-star Hotel Le Meurice overlooking the Tuileries Garden, they found themselves in a crowded city partying hysterically as it simultaneously hosted the World Exhibition and trembled in the shadow of war. As Lilly quickly discovered, nobody had more street credibility among the expatriates than Dottie, and her affectionate friends jockeyed to shower her with love and a great many invitations. There was a sentimental reunion with old friends like Sara and Gerald Murphy, as well as nostalgic evenings in Les Deux Magots and La Closerie des Lilas, still the favored hangouts of Americans in Paris.

“Fine time” is the phrase Lilly used to describe those first days of rushing around to dinner parties and country luncheons.
39
Unfortunately, the fine time was short-lived. In the spotlight since her Broadway success, she had grown accustomed to people fussing over her, but here she found herself treated with indifference by this crowd of self-absorbed expatriates with money. Her days of going unnoticed were over, but these people brought it back. It was painful to realize that her own admirers were “second-class stuff” compared to Dottie's fans.
40
Uncomfortable, truthfully more than a little jealous, she disliked playing second fiddle and compensated by pouting and drinking too much. Among those who got under her skin were the Murphys and their circle of prominent artists, musicians, and sleek sporty lesbians. But the one who annoyed her most was Alan Campbell, “a hard man for me to take,” she admitted.
41
He impressed her as snobbish, fussy, hopelessly overbearing, and presumably a gay closet case. By this time, she hated his guts.

Apologetic for snapping at him, she told Dottie that she simply couldn't help it because he made her nervous.

Dottie shrugged. “Dear Lilly, you'd be a psychotic if he didn't.”
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She herself bickered with her husband, who was never at a want for words.

Alan vanished every afternoon. Where was he? Lilly asked.

“Takes a sleeping pill,” said Dottie. “He hates to toss and turn from four to six.”

Meantime, there was plenty besides Alan to worry about. All around them Europe was in turmoil. Nazi Germany, whose armies had marched into the Rhineland, was on the brink of annexing Austria. And the civil war in Spain, in its fourteenth month, seemed like a prelude to a second world war. Fierce fighting and air strikes around the beleaguered capital of Madrid had failed, and the Republican government was forced to Valencia. The last place Dottie had intended on visiting was a combat zone because, she frankly admitted, she was “scared stiff” of getting her head blown off.
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What's more, she worried about visiting a country where people were starving. How could she possibly eat their food? An American journalist just back from Madrid would not listen to her excuses because the obvious solution was to go bearing donations of food for the Spanish and eat the local diet. On September 20, the Campbells ditched Lilly and departed for Madrid, their bags loaded with canned hams and chicken and beef stew, Kraft Welsh rarebit, and Horlicks malted milk.

•

On a late Sunday afternoon in October 1937, darkness had begun falling. Dottie was drinking vermouth with a lump of gray ice, a luxury in wartime, and gazing around the congested café. After a few days in Madrid, she and Alan had come to Valencia, a place where air raids could occur at any moment. Unnerved by the bombs, she could barely manage to smile. “There are things that never have been funny,” she decided, “and never will be.”
44
It was a working-class café, clamorous with families, even babies, and soldiers in faded uniforms, on a brief respite from the carnage at the front.

Aided by a Swedish interpreter, she was able to exchange words with soldiers at a nearby table, men who had spent nearly a year living through circumstances beyond their control. She expected them to talk about the war. But as the restaurant around them buzzed with chatter, they spoke grievously of missing their homes and their families, not knowing if their wives and children were dead or alive. What they didn't mention was the fighting. After they left, Dottie was shocked to discover that the soldiers had paid for her vermouth.

Five months later, when her beautifully told memory of this gloomy Sunday afternoon and the men she had met was published, the
New Yorker
labeled “Soldiers of the Republic” as fiction.

Midway through October, Lilly followed in the Campbells' footsteps. Her stay of three weeks, recounted in a thirty-page travel diary, would eventually appear in print decades later. Disappointingly, there was less about air raids than the kind of gee-whiz details recorded by tourists, things that may have seemed exotic at the moment but sound trivial afterward. One night in Madrid she was invited to dinner by Ernest Hemingway and his girlfriend and future wife, the journalist Martha Gellhorn. The meal, she wrote, was notable for excellent wine and tough beef. The fiancé was dismissed as a pretty woman with good taste in clothing. When shelling began, Lilly couldn't bring herself to watch. She shut her eyes in panic and stayed well away from the window.

If Lilly was catty about Martha Gellhorn, Gellhorn was inclined to believe the worst about Lilly and would question the authenticity of everything she wrote about her expedition to Spain. To Martha, she not only had swanned around like a crass tourist but was also a “dull” woman who did not tell the truth.

Lilly was lonely after the Campbells returned to their farm in Pennsylvania. Hanging around a war by herself was not the holiday she had envisioned, so she soon headed home. In New York she celebrated at “21” Club with ex-husband Arthur Kober because Dash was in Hollywood after finally getting a Mexican divorce. The trip, she decided, had made her cranky because “Paris was never my city,” no matter how beloved by Dottie and her friends.
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It was the last time they traveled together. As for Dottie's husband, she thought of him as a “fairy-shit” and tried to avoid his company.
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