The Last Days of Dorothy Parker (4 page)

•

Before Dottie and Alan visited Spain, they had been employed by Samuel Goldwyn earning a weekly salary of $5,200, the equivalent of about $90,000 in today's money. For this seductive paycheck, virtually unparalleled in 1937, they worked on ghastly scripts and attended untold numbers of story meetings, in which Dottie, bored the hell out of her mind, passed the time by knitting. Often she found herself at odds with Goldwyn, who thought little of her suggestions and once yelled at her in a room full of writers, “God
damn
it, Dottie! You and your God damn sophisticated jokes.” He was in the business of entertaining, he said. Too bad she knew nothing about audiences and what they wanted. People didn't go to the movies for high-minded ideas. They didn't pay money for jokes either. They simply wanted happy endings.

Arguing was useless. But Dottie, hackles up, roused herself. “I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.” She walked out in utter disgust.

Goldwyn looked around, bewildered. “Does anybody in here know what the hell that woman was talking about?”
47
Everybody knew; nobody was going out of his way to explain. Actually, endings didn't matter. What did matter was the money.

The gold-plated contract turned out to be short-lived, and when Goldwyn suddenly dropped their option in August of 1937, they retreated to their farm.

Lilly, meanwhile, continuing to make her home in New York, also worked for Sam Goldwyn. Unlike the Campbells, she had never felt comfortable putting down roots in Los Angeles, and neither was she satisfied seeing her name on drek. How could she make Goldwyn money on Broadway? There she had done her best only to produce a humiliating mess with
Days to Come
. She decided to try again.

•

“I hope you die!” Regina tells her husband. “I hope you die soon! I'll be waiting for you to die!”
48

In her parlor sits Regina Hubbard Giddens, watching as a sick man with a bad heart drops his medicine bottle. Horace asks her to go upstairs to his room for another bottle. Continuing to watch, Regina allows him to die.

The period drama, set in a small Southern town in 1900, charts the disintegration of the Hubbard clan, rapacious wolves who hate each other, and centers on the schemes of sister Regina, famously played by Tallulah Bankhead and later Bette Davis in the film, to snatch power from her brothers, even if it means ending up alone. Apparently, the Newhouses, Lilly's rich blood relatives on her mother's side, were the inspiration for
The Little Foxes
.
49

Her best-known work,
The Little Foxes
ran 410 performances on Broadway and continues to be revived to the present day. Its success not only established Lilly's position as an important playwright – she would be called America's Ibsen – but also made her rich. She bought an estate on the outskirts of Pleasantville, New York, a property of 130 acres with an 1810 house, woods full of deer, and a lake with three islands. At Hardscrabble Farm, she planted a vegetable garden and took up raising chickens (and selling the eggs). Partly this blissful rural retreat thirty-five miles from the city was purchased with thoughts of Hammett, who enjoyed country life and would spend time there over the next dozen years, not as family, but as a remote semipermanent houseguest who had little to offer her.

By the late 1930s, quite a few Hollywood screenwriters were seeking healthy antidotes to the artifice of Beverly Hills by purchasing agricultural property. For a while, Dottie, who had come to loathe Hollywood, had been experiencing a nesting urge. Having not given up the hope of raising a family, still trying to get pregnant after a miscarriage, she wanted a permanent home. So often did she repeat the word “roots,” usually after several martinis, that her nagging began to irritate her husband. “We haven't any roots, Alan. You can't put down roots in Beverly Hills.”
50
In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, overlooking the Delaware River Valley, they found an 111-acre farm whose purchase price of a mere $4,500 was less than one week's salary. Unlike Hardscrabble Farm, Fox House was totally uninhabitable and needed extensive renovation. Still, the expense was worth it because the result was an elaborate fourteen-room showplace. They hired a farmer to run the place, which was also worth it.

Clocking in at the studio was tricky when you lived thousands of miles away. Not for crack screenwriters, however, because by the late 1930s air travel had become more common and they could easily afford to fly. Whenever Dottie or Lilly had a writing job on the Coast, they shuttled back on a cross-country flight and simply settled down for months on end at a luxurious hotel. In 1940, the census taker would catch up with the Campbells comfortably ensconced at the Garden of Allah on Sunset Boulevard.

For the two friends, the late 1930s and early 1940s would be the best of times, at least superficially. Lilly enjoyed another Broadway success,
Watch on the Rhine
, while Dottie (and Alan) received an Academy Award nomination for
A Star Is Born
. As two of the most famous women writers of their day, their personalities became as familiar to the public as movie stars. Thanks to immense incomes, they too had privileged existences whose essence was excess: high-end real estate, deluxe cars, sophisticated friends, lavish soirees. In published photographs the two of them sometimes appear together sporting similar outfits, big wide-brim hats and smashing ankle-length fur coats.

On Manhattan's Upper East Side, Lilly purchased a six-story neo-Georgian townhouse and, later on, a house on Martha's Vineyard. Her income continued to rise, and by the midforties she was earning, for example, almost two million dollars in today's currency. In Bucks County, Alan Campbell bought his mother a home nearby; and he also imported a live-in servant from Richmond to drive the Packard. As the only black uniformed chauffeur the locals had ever seen, the man quickly became a novelty.

Indefatigable Communists, the friends continued to embrace blue-collar issues. Ordinary men and women appeared in Dottie's fiction (“Clothe the Naked,” “The Standard of Living”) and in some of Lilly's dramas (the ill-fated
Days to Come
), but the only working-class people in their real lives were the servants, black and white, whom they employed. Everyday Angelenos – the Hollywood flotsam and jetsam, the self-help cults, the health-food nuts who found their way into Nathanael West's novel
The Day of the Locust
– never reached their radar.

•

“Constant use had not worn ragged the fabric of their friendship,” Dottie wrote.
51
She was referring, not to herself and Lilly, but to a pair of young women named Annabel and Midge who were “surely born to be comrades.”

Stenographers in the same office, Annabel and Midge are best friends, whose desks sit companionably side by side. Boyfriends come and go, but the pair remain inseparable. On Saturday afternoons they stroll along Fifth Avenue playing their favorite game, doing what young women do when they have no money and nothing better to do: pretending somebody has died and left them each a million dollars to spend on themselves. Spying a double rope of pearls in a jewelry store window, presumably Tiffany's, they muster the courage to go inside, only to learn the price is a quarter-million dollars. Unlike Truman Capote's good-time girl who zips off to Tiffany's for breakfast,
52
Dottie's heroines are working girls who have never visited the Stork Club or accepted money from men. They earn less than twenty dollars a week typing and taking dictation, and they live at home with their parents.

Midge and Annabel were comrades in “The Standard of Living,” a story of Dottie's published by the
New Yorker
in 1941. By this time, she and Lilly had been comrades for seven years and, like the fictional secretaries, the fabric of their friendship remained unchanged; in fact, it was stronger than ever. What could be more natural than to dedicate her new volume of stories to Lilly, whom she held in high regard for both her political commitment and her talent as a playwright. (
Here Lies
, her seventh book, would be her last.) The following year, she composed an effusive foreword for a special edition of Lilly's play,
Watch on the Rhine
, to benefit the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (a group later designated to be a Communist front by the House Un-American Activities Committee or HUAC).

Most of all, they had fun together. There was plenty of teasing and laughing at each other's jokes, no matter how lame. Their repartee amused not only each other but anybody within earshot. One time it was a ribald afternoon-long contest over which one had slept with the most awful men. Dottie proclaimed herself the winner; Lilly insisted she was bragging. Another time, after a party in honor of Helen Keller, which Dottie had declined to attend, Lilly came home disgusted by the pious chatter. What a waste of time, she complained. Without looking up from a book, Dottie said mildly, “It's your own fault, dear. Didn't I tell you she was a con woman and a dyke?”
53
Peter Feibleman, the writer who was Lilly's protégé, called them “a perfectly matched pair, a kind of intellectual vaudeville team.”

Notwithstanding their perfect match, the bond between them depended on censoring anything disagreeable. In contrast to Lilly's theatrical blowups with practically everybody she knew, she uncharacteristically muzzled herself around Dottie. Hurt feelings were not voiced, disappointments not confronted, and good manners unfailingly observed. Quenching anger and nursing grudges, they carefully avoided getting into fights. Lilly liked to insist that they never once exchanged “even a mild, unpleasant word,” but it would turn out that she was quietly keeping score.
54
When her father died, she made a list of those friends who had sent condolences. Dottie, she noted, did not.

It seemed clear to the playwright Ruth Goetz, a friend of both women, that Dottie admired Lilly, “but Lillian did not admire Dottie because she had no admiring mechanisms, and she wasn't generous about anything.”
55
Actually, there were few women in Lilly's life simply because she didn't like her own sex and saw no reason to be kind. She viewed women with suspicion, sometimes treating them savagely, or as the screenwriter Frances Goodrich put it bluntly, she could “get rough.”
56

The she-Hammett much preferred to be one of the boys, as if association with the female sex might brand her second-class goods. Dottie, too, was famous for hanging out with the guys at the Round Table, and her oldest best friend was a man, the humorist Robert Benchley. Significantly, one of her chief literary subjects was the male sex, but her fascination with men was seeded with comic but ruthless digs, undergirded by exasperation, if not outright animosity. She is likely to have agreed with Rebecca West's quip that the opposite sex is primarily useful for lifting pianos. Despite half-joking remarks – “Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman”
57
– she certainly was not a woman-hater, as her verses and stories attest. For one thing, she wholeheartedly enjoyed the company of women and formed numerous affectionate relationships, sometimes with quite ferocious card-carrying feminists. Also, despite her love-hungry panic around men, she wore her beliefs like a badge and made a point of joking that she'd been an ardent feminist since buffalo roamed in Central Park. Lilly, scorning sisterhood as passé, equated it with those quaint suffragettes of her mother's generation, and when embraced by feminists in the 1970s, refused to acknowledge that the women's movement had any importance whatsoever.

Lilly was right: she and Dottie were an odd couple and should not have been compatible. But they were.

In 1944, when Dottie's work was collected into
The Portable Dorothy Parker
, she inscribed Lilly's copy with a syrupy love letter:

“For Miss Hellman – The most beautiful, the most rich, the most chic, the most dashing, the most mysterious, the most fragrant, the most nobly-born, the most elegant, the most cryptic, the most startling, the most glorious, the most lovely – in short, for Miss Hellman (from Miss Parker).”
58

To be sure, it was hearts and flowers fluff but seemed appropriate nonetheless. By 1945, after fifteen years of economic depression and a brutal war, everybody was starved for a bit of giddiness. Soon, Alan and Dash would be back safely from the service,
59
life would go on as before in peaceful Beverly Hills and pastoral Bucks County. With every reason to believe in the future, they envisioned stories, plays, and movies, love, money, and fun. Anything else, they didn't want to know about.

But that was a mistake, because in the years following the war, they would have to grapple with epic burdens, the kind of messes that made no sense. One question, by then, was whether they were going to prison. The other question was for how long.

(1951–1963)

Lilly knew the subpoena was coming. When a man wearing a black preacher's suit showed up at her house, he removed his hat before politely asking if she was Lillian Hellman. Then he handed over the envelope ordering her appearance before the committee investigating Communist influence in the motion picture industry. While he stood waiting, she read the subpoena, then slammed the door in his face.

She did not think that she could feel so calm. Without telling anyone about the subpoena, she spent the next hour reading her mail and finally lay down for a nap. But she awoke drenched in sweat.

In September 1951, a screenwriter named Martin Berkeley had told the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a member of the Communist Party for seven years, while working at MGM and Columbia. He testified under oath that scores of actors, directors, and fellow writers also belonged to the party and went on to identify, by name, 161 individuals. Among them were Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett, and Alan Campbell. He placed the four of them, plus Donald Ogden Stewart, at his home on the day when, he said, the Hollywood section of the party was organized in June 1937. His place, he added, was chosen because he had a large living room and ample parking facilities. Nobody coughed up more names than Berkeley, who seems to have panicked and tossed in the names of innocent bystanders, like Alan, having no involvement with the party.

As Lilly soon learned, all her alternatives were unpleasant. The Fifth Amendment gave her a constitutional right to refuse to answer questions on the grounds of self-incrimination, but she did not wish to claim the privilege, which she considered a sleazy circumvention famously favored by drug dealers and Mafioso. Knowing that she was in great trouble, she took the subpoena to a Washington attorney specializing in civil liberties and emphatically stated her own agenda. “I'm not going to jail,” she told Joseph Rauh.
60
Neither would she name names or take the Fifth. In fact, she would only answer questions about her own life. But, he warned, if she replied to questions about herself, she could be forced to talk about other people or face contempt charges. It was pointless to attempt horse-trading with the committee. Once again, she said that her main purpose was to avoid jail.

Following Rauh's instructions, she prepared an account of her political activities for the committee. Accordingly, she wrote about how she'd joined the party in 1938 without giving it much thought and remained a member until 1940. She would willingly tell the committee about her own activities but could not, in all good conscience, hurt innocent people to save her own skin. Leaning toward a strategy of moral outrage, she continued: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.” Rauh rewrote her statement but omitted the troublesome admission of party membership and dispatched it to the committee on May 19, 1952. Lilly, meanwhile, had her hair freshly colored and bought a lovely silk dress, a black-and-brown-checked Balmain.

Two days later, at 11
A.M.
, she presented herself at the Old House Office Building wearing the Balmain with a black hat and carrying a handkerchief. Her stomach in knots, but appearing cool, Rauh at her side, she was sworn in and cautiously began responding to the committee's questions.

What studios had she worked for? What was she doing in 1937?

To these routine inquiries she kept her answers concise. Rauh had warned her not to make a spectacle of herself, no strutting and posturing, specifically, to refrain from jokes or express belligerence, like some previous witnesses had done, to their regret. Then the committee members got down to business: Had she ever met Martin Berkeley? She must refuse to answer, she said. Berkeley's testimony was read aloud. At this point, Joseph Rauh distributed copies of her statement of conscience to the committee, to be read into the record, and also passed out copies to the press gallery. The committee continued to concentrate on Martin Berkeley. Did she attend the meeting at his house? She declined to answer.

There was more. Questions followed questions until, finally, came the sixty-four-dollar question: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? Like so many others before her, she refused to incriminate herself and invoked the Fifth Amendment. After one hour and seven minutes, she was surprised when they suddenly excused her. Now what?

Tense, she sat waiting for the next question. It was a badly run operation. “
Get up
,” Rauh whispered in her ear. She must leave the building immediately, walking swiftly without running, and speaking to no one. Interviews or a press conference would make more trouble for herself.

That same afternoon on the plane back to New York, she broke down and vomited, she would remember. Regrettably, she had been forced to take the Fifth, but she had not named names, and that was a victory of sorts. An even bigger surprise was getting off without being prosecuted. Did her sex save her?

Although Martin Berkeley swore Dottie was present at the organization meeting of the Hollywood Communist Party, HUAC failed to subpoena her. Neither did they bother to call Alan Campbell, who was viewed by the government as nothing more than a bystander and thus not worth questioning. Several years earlier, Dottie had divorced Alan who remained in England after the war because of another woman. By the time he made his way home in 1946, tail between his legs, she rejected the possibility of reconciliation. Nothing remained of either their marriage or their professional collaboration, and Alan would not share her Oscar nomination for
Smash-Up
.

Living without Alan proved more difficult than expected, and so in 1950 she took an unusual step, one that horrified Lilly. “Her husband was a pip-squeak, but she saw fit to remarry him.”
61
The decision was, in some respects, predictable, a case of not being able to live together or apart. The ceremony took place in Hollywood, where Alan was trying to get work at the studios. Mainly, he scraped out a living from income as one of the original investors in the musical
South Pacific
, directed by his friend Joshua Logan. Lilly's skepticism turned out to be realistic because the second marriage didn't work either. Dottie quietly retreated to New York after just a few months and moved into the Volney, a residence hotel on East Seventy-fourth Street in which she would make her home off and on for the rest of her life and which served as the inspiration for her feminist play
The Ladies of the Corridor
.
62

Four years after Berkeley's testimony, Dottie was finally called as a witness, in February 1955, and then it was not by HUAC but a New York State committee investigating financial contributions to organizations considered to be Communist-run. In the thirties and forties, Dottie had lent her name and money to so many of these supposed “front” groups that she might have lost count. (The actual number was thirty-three.)

Worried that Dottie might panic, Lilly made a special point of offering to accompany her downtown to the court house.

“Why?” replied Dottie,
63
who chose to view the summons as a request, not as a command, and consequently saw no reason to make a big deal of it. Several weeks earlier, not for the first time either, FBI agents came by and commenced asking questions about her various affiliations. Did she belong to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade? The League of American Writers? The agents could barely make themselves heard above the yammering of her poodle. Dottie frowned and pretended to be mystified by their inquiries. “My influence?” she said, as if unfamiliar with the word.
64
Jesus Christ, she couldn't even get her dog to shut up. Unbeknownst to her, the FBI had been keeping an eye on her activities since 1939, even though their surveillance files consisted largely of newspaper clippings and fund-raising letters.

Still, when she arrived at the New York County Courthouse, she had taken pains to look stylish. She was wearing a mink jacket and a spiffy Tyrolean hat, along with an expression of discreet contempt. The questions, predictable, centered on how much money had been raised and what happened to the funds. Dottie's position was that she could do nothing for the Committee, unfortunately. How was she supposed to know what the Spanish Refugee Appeal did with its money? The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League? She had no idea it was controlled by Communists.

Was she a member of the Communist Party? Raising her voice for the first time, she promptly invoked the protection of the Fifth Amendment.

Shortly thereafter, the government concluded that she presented no danger to national security and finally closed its Parker files, which by this time ran to beyond nine hundred pages.

•

In time, Lilly would write about the financial consequences of the blacklist, the overwhelming hardships it created for the victims. Some writers did not work in their professions for ten years, some never again. Unfortunately for Hammett, the cost was even greater. His association with a left-wing group designated as a Communist front – and his refusal to name contributors to its bail fund – led to a conviction for contempt of court. Five months in prison left him sick and broken. In her own case, it meant both the loss of Hollywood assignments and her country home at Hardscrabble Farm. In 1953, she briefly took a movie-writing job in Rome and tried to save by living in a cheap hotel. Back home, pinching pennies, she gave up taxis and allotted herself five dollars a week to splurge on candy bars and dime-store lipsticks. To make ends meet, she would later claim to have worked as a part-time clerk, under an assumed name, in the grocery section of a department store.

But for all the painful losses, her plight was not quite the catastrophe she pictured. For the most part, her everyday life was little changed. In fact, she continued to soldier on as before in her Manhattan townhouse, with a housekeeper and dinner parties, and she still appeared in tasteful if less showy designer clothes. She was, to be sure, not so wealthy as she had been. Still, it seemed like a great comedown.

What was a setback – and sometimes nothing more than a nuisance – for Lilly was a calamity for Dottie. Almost sixty, she had been earning her living as a professional writer for more than thirty-seven years. Her last nonwriting employment was playing piano at a dance studio in 1913. Without question, she was a miserable businessperson, neglecting to cash checks promptly and relying on her husband to manage the checkbook, and she had made no plans for her older years.

For a while, the sale of the Bucks County farm provided a comfortable nest egg, but it didn't take long to exhaust the money, and when debts stacked up she was forced to borrow from Lilly – indeed, Lilly claimed, “a good deal of money.”
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True to form, they didn't talk about repayment because good friends did not discuss such disagreeable subjects. Instead, Dottie insisted on giving her the Picasso watercolor and the Utrillo she had owned since the thirties. Afterward, during another emergency, she had to reclaim the Utrillo and sell it. The true extent of Lilly's financial woes is suggested by the fact that Dottie felt comfortable asking for a loan, which would not have been the case otherwise. Besides, in Dottie's eyes, Lilly may not have appeared exactly broke because she'd just purchased a summer home on Martha's Vineyard.

On the face of it, their friendship continued unchanged during the fifties. When Lilly was working with Leonard Bernstein on a musical adaptation of
Candide
, she invited Dottie to contribute lyrics for the song “Gavotte.” Apart from such professional favors, Lilly was a hospitable hostess who regularly extended invitations to the Vineyard. For whatever reason, unclear to Dottie, she could never be in the house when Dash was around. After a ferry ride churning through seven miles of seas from Woods Hole, she sometimes would find herself relegated to a guesthouse down the road. Being a good sport, she never complained.

Once she was visiting when Lilly got a call to drop everything and leave the island. Before dashing off, she started flitting around chopping and stirring, spooning the mixtures into little pans. She slapped together three days of suppers, writing down instructions about how long to heat each casserole and even lighting the oven before leaving. Besides the hot meals, she left an assortment of fancy sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs.

Lilly got home to find the casseroles untouched, the eggs and sandwiches uneaten. It looked like Dottie had consumed nothing but a large chunk of cheese. If this wasn't bad enough, the oven was still on. All that effort to be a good hostess, all those dried-up casseroles and soggy sandwiches. Needless to say, Lilly felt like throttling her. But there was no showdown, not so much as a mention of the uneaten meals.

One of Lilly's obsessive concerns happened to be food, especially what she considered superior food. Anything less than the best was disdained as “drek,” or “goy drek.” Her culinary tastes were traditional, her gastronomic fetishes inherited from a previous generation of cooks. The dishes she prized were tripe, kippers, quail, chicken hash, calves liver, rabbit, venison, and boiled short ribs. She made soufflés and mousses and of course mayonnaise from scratch. A cook of high standards, she purchased ingredients at first-class stores and bought her meats and poultry at Schaller & Weber, an overpriced German butcher in Manhattan's Yorkville.

To Dottie, who had never learned to cook, a fixation with food seemed completely daft. She didn't know the first thing about kitchens and would eat raw bacon before turning on the stove. When Ruth Goetz had her over for dinner, she knew what to expect. Dottie would pick at her plate, sample a morsel or two, and whisper, “Oh that's lovely.”
66
Like a well-behaved child, “she overthanked you when she arrived and overthanked you when she left,” Ruth said. Considering the length of Lilly's friendship, twenty years by then, it's rather odd that she remained unaware of Dottie's indifference to food. Give her a meal in a glass and she would be happy.