The Last Days of Dorothy Parker (5 page)

•

One day in 1959 a woman came to the Volney to interview Dottie. It was for a Columbia University program that was collecting oral histories of illustrious public figures, described to her as one of those scholarly projects that had become something of a trend lately. As she was being hooked up to the recorder, already wanting to jump out the window, she adopted a grande dame strategy in preparation for taking liberties with the facts.

“I'm not very important,” she warned the interviewer Joan Franklin, who had showed up with her husband, Robert. Furthermore, nobody cared to hear what she had to say. “The Lord knows I don't want to hear about myself.”

Basically, her poor-little-me routine was meant to generate a bit of sympathy or, at the very least, a laugh, but this time she misjudged because her exaggerations seemed to intimidate Franklin. Jittery, she proceeded to tiptoe through a list of bland, flat-footed questions, mainly about Hollywood, the blacklist, and other subjects that Dottie preferred not to think about. Had she not been drinking, she might have behaved herself. The alcohol, apparently, encouraged her to sweep aside practically every question with the hauteur of a queen.

• Her motion pictures? “Never saw them. Not in my contract, for God's sake.”
  
• Screenwriting? “Why do you keep asking me about Hollywood?”
  
• The blacklist? “For heaven's sweet sake. I don't know about the blacklist thing.”
  
• Her fiction? “Not important. Listen, my dear, I do the best I can.”
  67
  
• Her friends? “Dead. I go staggering on with my graying hair.”
  
• The Spanish Civil War? “The Spanish are wonderful people.”
  
• A memoir? “I've considered it.”
  

In the end, she had two choices: shoot Franklin or quote Samuel Johnson. She quoted Dr. Johnson – “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money” – at which point Franklin shut off the recorder. Dottie had managed to yap her head off for an hour without saying a single thing of importance.

The transcript, archived at Columbia University's Butler Library, reads on paper like an ordinary conversation, at least for much of the time. But on the tape, Dottie shows no sign of her soft feathery voice and sounds like what she was – gassed. Likewise, the forlorn interviewer also sounds like what she was – a nervous wreck.
68

•

During the fifties, with Hollywood barred to her, Lilly returned to Broadway. She wrote adaptations for four shows, including the book for a Leonard Bernstein operetta based on
Candide
. Dottie wrote a play too, her first since 1924, in collaboration with one of her boyfriends, Arnaud d'Usseau.
The Ladies of the Corridor
depicted the lives of older women living on their own in a Manhattan hotel, and the inspiration was, of course, her own home at the Volney.

For both women, love was as hard to get in the 1950s as a screenwriting job. Casual sex was a different story. Although Lilly had never fallen out of love with Dash, she was obliged to seek affection elsewhere. She made do with a string of exemplary but uninspiring males: one a career diplomat, one a young thing twenty-five years her junior, two theatrical producers, others who were journalists, editors, publishers, lawyers; men who, for one reason or another, were stolen from their wives or otherwise unavailable. In the end, there were no deep ties (except to the boy writer who one day would inherit her estate) and no man as thrilling as Hammett.

The men that set Dottie's heart aflutter seemed to reinforce her reputation for choosing unsuitable lovers. A perfectionist in her writing, she put up with the biggest jackasses in her bed. As usual, the dalliances came to nothing, and the men slunk back to their hopeless marriages. One time in Cuernavaca, the fellow with whom she was living dumped her for another woman. On top of that he stole her dog. She had to find her way, alone and without luggage, from Mexico City to the Plaza Hotel in New York. Another time, when she and d'Usseau were working on
The Ladies of the Corridor
, his wife Susan rationed her liquor and forced her to eat home-cooked dinners. From time to time she saw Alan Campbell, to whom she was still legally wed, but after two marriages there could be nothing more between them.

•

Norma Place covered a single block, from North Doheny to Hilldale, with a bank and post office at one end and small apartment buildings at the other. The street, located in West Hollywood and supposedly named after the silent-screen star Norma Talmadge, was known as Boys Town because its residents, men with muscular bodies and flawless tans, were primarily gay.

It was a leafy green neighborhood of 1920s vintage cottages set on small lots with neat front yards and narrow, unpaved driveways. Alan Campbell scraped together enough to purchase a tidy two-bedroom, one-bath home at number 8983, possibly lending some credibility to rumors of his bisexuality, but more likely because he was drawn to the vibrant atmosphere. In his late fifties, he was a sociable, physically attractive gentleman who, a neighbor recalled, did not appear to be a practicing homosexual, nor did he seem to be romantically coupled with women either.

In the spring of 1961, Dottie took up residence with Alan on Norma Place. Not that she changed her mind about marriage – it wasn't any fresh start with him that tempted her back to Hollywood; it was, in fact, money.

In recent months, Alan's fortunes had taken a turn for the better when he began getting movie work again. His last job on a feature was a low-budget Universal film (
Woman on the Run
) in 1950; throughout the fifties he had eked out a modest living from television (
The Jack Benny Program
,
Lux Video Theatre
). On the verge of getting a break – the possibility of employment at Fox – he urged Dottie to join him. The movie was an upcoming star vehicle for Marilyn Monroe, an adaptation of a French comedy called
The Good Soup
, but getting hired depended entirely on Dottie's collaboration. To Alan's optimistic thinking, a Monroe picture could not help but do well, and further assignments could be expected. It was not too late, he believed, to reestablish themselves as the successful comedy duo of the thirties, the team whose work on
A Star Is Born
yielded them an Oscar nomination. To a professional pessimist like Dottie, invariably prepared for the possibility of failure, the idea must have been hard to imagine. Yet, what mattered was that his starry-eyed strategy appeared halfway promising for the short term. Whether it would continue indefinitely remained to be seen.

Over the years Dottie had learned a lot about Hollywood, and what she knew was that she hated the place. Still, the Fox job meant good money and the satisfaction of lucrative paychecks for the foreseeable future, security that had been missing from her life. Obviously there were other factors to consider: much-needed dental work that she'd been postponing and Alan's agreement that she could have a nice bedroom of her own. And, of course, the weather was glorious.

A fiscally prudent individual, Alan owned a handful of stocks, two insurance policies, some real estate in Virginia, and with his good credit had no problem obtaining a mortgage. Brimming with home improvement projects, he intended to add a second bathroom and convert the garage into a rental apartment. It was a far cry from the glory days of swimming pools and Picassos, but if living grandly was no longer possible, he still wished to live well, and what he fancied next was a Jaguar, preferably dark green.

The decision to return was terrifying, and yet Dottie had little to lose. At the time nothing was happening for her in New York. Her ideas, it seemed, were passé; her writing, she believed, had gone out of style. In the end, the deciding factor was not “20th Century Fucks,” as she called the studio, or
The Good Soup
, fluff that had flopped on Broadway, but its star. She was smitten with Marilyn Monroe – “I am crazy about her”
69
– and could not pass up the enticing opportunity to write a Monroe film. Of course, starting over with Alan was risky. It had been some years since they worked or lived together, and the brief second marriage had tested the limits of her patience.

In no time at all, she settled into the community, or, as she liked to call it, “Peyton Place West.” Along Norma Place she became a familiar figure being ferried around in the Jaguar by her husband or walking her poodle Cliché along with a new Sealyham puppy. Soon she was making new friends, chatting up her gay neighbors, holding court at their frequent cocktail parties. Perhaps most important, she made the acquaintance of a cheerful young man living down the street, another writer working at Fox. Of all the people she met, it was Wyatt Cooper who would be the bright spot in her life on Norma Place.

Raised on a farm in Quitman, Mississippi, one of nine children, Wyatt grew up in a family that might well have come out of a Faulkner novel. Dottie, accordingly, nicknamed him the Sharecropper. As a child he was emotionally scarred by a tyrannical, womanizing father who told him “You're no damn good,” and whose typical advice was backwoods basic: “Take a leak as soon as you finish & always wash it off with soap and water.”
70

From his harrowing early years, Wyatt had matured into a caring, uncommonly sensitive man, one of the kindest people Dottie knew. She delighted in his company because, happily, he understood what was funny, and like herself loved giggling and swapping gossipy shoptalk, the more outrageous the better. The farmer's son with the boyish smile was thirty-four but appeared ten years younger. As if unaware of the three decades between them, he treated her like a contemporary. If Dottie had succeeded in having a baby, and if it were a son, she would have wanted a boy like Wyatt.

At the studio, Dottie and Alan and Wyatt fell into the habit of lunching together. Bypassing the commissary, they trawled around the area looking for amusing restaurants and stores. One day while browsing in a Santa Monica antique shop, Dottie caught sight of a set of hand-painted porcelain figurines, Napoleon and his marshals, the courageous men who led his battles. Endlessly fascinating to her were, not just the campaigns, but also Napoleon's career, his family, and his exile to Elba. The generals were nine inches high, and she wanted all thirteen of them. To display the miniatures in style, Alan put up a shelf in the living room and installed a special overhead light.

Wyatt was struck by how much fun the pair had together, “as they must have done in earlier and younger days.”
71
Of course they bickered, but even so, their solidarity was obvious. At the studio, they had no trouble coming up with, as Dottie called it, “a darling, bawdy farce” for Marilyn.
72
In their little house, where they chose not to own a TV set, evenings were spent leisurely reading, chain-smoking, and sipping Scotch; as before, she did not involve herself in housekeeping or cooking. After Cliché had puppies there were five dogs on the premises (Alan had little patience with the messes). For the fourth year she continued to entertain
Esquire
readers with her witty book column (“This novel,” she said admiringly of Shirley Jackson's
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
, “brings back all my faith in terror and death.”
73
) For a person who never admitted knowing happiness, who had a lifelong love affair with negativity, she had found a surprising degree of contentment.

During this period, Dottie saw nothing of Lilly. There was her aversion to Alan but also the fact that Dottie made no trips back to New York, and so their contacts were necessarily limited to phone calls or letters. A sort of liaison between them was Peter Feibleman, Lilly's youthful protégé, who coincidentally lived a few houses down the street and sometimes would stop for a drink. From Peter, Dottie learned that Lilly was teaching at Harvard and that she was elected vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, an impressive honor. Likewise, information traveled the opposite direction because Lilly kept tabs on Dottie, asking for news and generally ending with the question of money. Did she have enough? She was living on “a shoestring,” Feibleman reported.
74

The Campbells may have appeared pinched to Peter and Lilly, but they were hardly living hand to mouth; indeed, they were no worse off than any working-class couple. They were doing their best, given the circumstances. The shoestring continued to hold nicely.

Until it snapped. As happened all the time in Hollywood, the studio followed standard procedure and turned over their script to additional writers. Dottie, however, could not pretend to take it in stride and told friends that she felt “sickened.” As she described it, ‘hired swine burned the pot” and turned
The Good Soup
into “a kind of gaudy gazpacho.” Turned out, it didn't matter. The Campbells found themselves off the Fox payroll but so was Marilyn, fired from her current film
Something's Got to Give
and slapped with a half-million-dollar lawsuit. She was supposed to be ill. Disgusted but philosophical, Dottie allowed that Monroe might have been a problem. “Of course, Marilyn can't help her behavior. She is always in terror.” A few months later, Monroe was dead and
The Good Soup
shelved forever.
75
Who, in her right mind, could have predicted such an improbable outcome?

The reconciliation that had begun with so much promise in 1961 quickly dribbled away, only to be replaced eighteen months later by perpetual friction. Living together as housemates had become far more perilous than either of them expected. Wyatt Cooper, accustomed to their genial crabbiness, was distressed to find them sometimes at each other's throats.

Once the movie money disappeared, the ground shifted beneath them and the days became purposeless, with too much time on their hands and too much dependence on alcohol. No assignments were forthcoming. Alan may have tried and failed, but then he stopped trying. For a brief period Dottie taught a class at California State University, but eventually they were living on unemployment insurance, her royalties, and checks from
Esquire
, which had raised her rate from $600 to $750 a month and generously paid whether or not she submitted a column. Frequently she was late, or sent nothing, even though she claimed to be working. Sometimes, distrustful, Alan played crafty games. At one point, he placed a hair on her typewriter, assuring Wyatt that “when I get back it'll still be there.”
76
Other times, he loaded stacks of unread review copies into his Jaguar and made the rounds of local bookshops. He can be excused for feeling nervous because the end of unemployment benefits was looming.