The Last Days of Dorothy Parker (6 page)

By the spring of 1963 the cracks in their relationship were getting hard to hide. Alan, increasingly grouchy, made no effort to look for work and typically started off the day drinking. Dottie retaliated by jabbing him with old insults, telling him harshly that he was hopeless, a horse's ass, a writer of dubious achievements still clinging to her coattail. Her browbeating made him tear up.

“He used to be able to drink and still have fun,” she told Wyatt, ignoring her own overindulgence in Scotch. But Alan, who had shut down, was not much of a party guy anymore.

When the actress Cathleen Nesbitt was invited to supper, Alan got mumbly drunk. Hustling back and forth to the kitchen, he finally dished up a ruinous meal of burned roast and salad garnished with – what the hell was that? – speckles of aluminum foil.

•

On June 14, Dottie had been at the hairdresser. When she returned home in the late afternoon, Alan lay sleeping, curled in a fetal ball, knees folded up. A plastic dry-cleaners bag was wrapped around his neck. Then she saw that he was dead. There were Seconals spilled on the rug next to the bed, and when she shook him he was already stiff.

To those who came swooping into the house that night in June 1963, the procession of neighbors, the police, and the ambulance crew – and to those she phoned, such as Lilly in New York and Wyatt somewhere or other in Alabama – Dottie denied that Alan had killed himself. Before dozing off for his nap, which he had done untold hundreds of times, he must have lost track of the Seconals he'd taken. Another thing: he left no suicide note.

That Friday morning he'd been drinking Bloody Marys. He was plastered, recalled their maid Clara Lester, who described him as “drunk as a skunk.”
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In the expert opinion of the State of California Department of Health, Alan's death was caused by “acute barbiturate poisoning due to an ingestion of an overdose.” Its conclusion (which Dottie would always dispute): “probable suicide.”

That evening she talked mindlessly, having no patience with those who tried to comfort her. What appeared to be understandable shock and bereavement was blended with an even more powerful emotion: outrage. After twenty-nine years he had left her, once again. Without saying boo, not so much as a fare-thee-well, he'd simply toddled away.

Everybody was eager to help, but Dottie had nothing to suggest.

“What can I do?” a neighbor purred.

Dottie turned to her and said, “Get me a new husband.”
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The woman was shocked.

“Then run down to the corner and get me a ham and cheese on rye. And tell them to hold the mayo.”

An ambulance came to take Alan away. Still, people continued to stand around elbow to elbow, fixing themselves drinks and giving her hugs.

She had always told herself that the worst to befall people were not the tragedies of life but the messes. Make no mistake: what happened to Alan may have been the result of a time bomb that had been ticking for months, but it also was the cruelest, most unforgiveable kind of sloppiness. He had fled, leaving her to clean up the mess.

(1964–1967)

It was chilly when Dottie straggled home, her plane landing at an airport called Idlewild when she'd left but rechristened John F. Kennedy International in her absence. In the heart of town, bare trees stretched across a dirty gray sky, and the March temperatures barely topped thirty degrees. Her last months in Hollywood had passed in a blur of sticky heat, a painful broken shoulder, and the obligation to tidy up Alan's mess. Finally, his things had been shipped to his mother in Virginia, the dogs given away, the bank accounts closed, the house, car, and furnishings disposed of, the clutter cleared. “A clean sweep,” she called her attempt to purge herself of the things associated with Alan.
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Free again, her suitcases bulging with the total of her earthly possessions (including the cherished Napoleon generals), the seventy-year-old exile rented a furnished one-bedroom apartment in the Volney.

Located on the fashionable Upper East Side, the Volney was the kind of place where white-gloved widows and refined divorcées lived with cherished pets. (Dottie's poodle Cliché had died, but she still had one of her puppies, Troisième “Troy”). Apartment 8E had the minimalist look of a dentist's waiting room, and some of Dottie's visitors were to remember bare walls, a scarcity of knickknacks, hardly a few framed photos and books. Common to the elderly, she had pared down her surroundings, perhaps unconsciously, although fripperies of any kind had never much interested her. It was Alan, a lover of objects, who had adored decorating. Her apartment was unpretentious with a kitchenette and a dining table wedged into the corner of the living room. Did she long for the vanished house and pool on North Canon Drive, her comfortable fieldstone farmhouse in Pennsylvania with its apple orchards? Probably not.

The first months were difficult. Weighing eighty pounds and suffering from malnutrition, she resembled some survivor of the Bataan Death March. Her arm was in a sling, her eyes were failing. It took two or three packs of Chesterfields to get through the day. “I should be dead,” she would say, not entirely in jest, after a few Scotches, and sometimes before.
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As if the broken shoulder wasn't enough, other debilitating ailments arose: bursitis, pneumonia, and poor balance leading to falls and fractures that sent her to the hospital more than once and weakened her self-confidence. Everything seemed to go haywire. Unable to dress, bathe, or feed herself, she needed the care of a practical nurse. For many months she found herself cooped up in 8E with a middle-aged woman in a uniform and organdy apron, who bossed her around, talked endlessly, and covered the dining table in plastic. Before long, the enforced intimacy was driving her nuts. In despair, she bought a television set and kept it on all day to escape the nurse's chatter. Whiling away the hours, she soon became a regular viewer of soap operas, particularly
As the World Turns
.

Among her most serious worries was money. After settling Alan's estate, she had felt optimistic. In addition to the proceeds from the house and car, there was a life insurance policy and sale of stock certificates. Armed with $41,500 from the estate, combined with her own income from royalties and options, she understood that her nest egg was not a fortune – far from it, in fact – but hopefully enough to get by if she was frugal. Missing was a reserve for emergencies, and because she was ill and faced with hospital and nursing bills, she sometimes required help from friends. (Medicare would not begin for another two years.)

In the meantime, trying to get well, she found no energy for work. “I can't use my typewriter,” she told a visitor, because she might as well have tried to climb Mount Everest.
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Although lifting her arms took immense effort, she found it possible to write with a pencil. One of her final pieces, published in
Esquire
, was a lengthy caption to accompany paintings of John Koch. In a poignant reverie titled “New York at 6:30
P.M.
,” she returned to a departed time when she was growing up, replaying in her head the sweet moments when dusk fell across the city, when hostesses who had stepped from the pages of Edith Wharton were presiding over traditional drawing rooms, whose curtains had not yet been drawn and whose fires were being lit in real fireplaces. “There is no such hour on the present clock as 6:30 New York time,” she wrote. “Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.”
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Struggling herself to get through the twilight, she was surprised to realize how much she had aged. She had expected her demise, even tried to hasten its arrival when she was thirty, and thirty-three, and thirty-nine, not counting one halfhearted attempt to kill herself with shoe polish at thirty-six. But what she had not imagined was decay, discovering herself an old woman in a cotton housedress and flapping slippers, dependent on strangers to wipe her behind. This is the part of her life that biographers would skip over.

•

In early February 1965, Dottie invited Oscar Bernstien to the Volney because she decided it was time to make provisions for her estate. By coincidence, the law firm of O'Dwyer & Bernstien represented Lillian Hellman, but this played no part in her choice. Her friendship with Oscar and his wife, Rebecca, went back five decades. Of greater importance, she knew his office to be a champion of civil rights.

There was no discussion about her last will and testament because she knew exactly what she wanted to do. There were no charitable donations, no financial bequests or sentimental gifts of trinkets to relatives and friends. In fact, just a single individual was mentioned, and he was a total stranger.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a thirty-six-year-old clergyman, pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Ten years earlier, Dr. King had led the Montgomery bus boycott – the nation's first black nonviolent demonstration – which led to the U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring laws that required segregated buses to be unconstitutional. During the yearlong boycott, King was jailed, his phone wiretapped, and his home bombed, but his cause triumphed and he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest recipient ever. At the present time, it was King who personified the struggle for civil rights, and his “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, would be considered the defining moment of the movement.

Dottie and Dr. King had never met. Neither had she written about him, marched with him, talked about him to others, or praised his work publicly. There were no mutual friends, seemingly no personal connection whatsoever between the two. What she wished to offer him, and everything he represented, was a heartfelt version of herself, the Dorothy Parker who in her thirties had got arrested for demonstrating in Boston on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. At the Volney, her mind clear forty years later but too old to march, she contributed what she could.

The civil rights movement had stirred her impassioned feelings of outrage over oppression, and so she had followed news of the Ku Klux Klan murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi with anguish. Two weeks after signing her will, Malcolm X would be assassinated, and that was followed in March by what would come to be known as the Bloody Sunday march to Montgomery. History came in a rush that year.

Dottie's assets consisted mainly of two accounts at the Chemical Bank and some fifty or sixty shares of
New Yorker
common stock; she owned no property or insurance policies. But in addition to the immediate bequest, she left Dr. King a gift of far greater significance: her copyrights and royalties. This meant that he would receive all profits from her work during his lifetime, and then these rights would be transferred someday, decades in the future, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Her decision came as no surprise to Oscar Bernstien. To be sure, a white writer leaving her estate to a black civil rights leader was highly unusual; in fact, nothing comparable sprung to mind. But under the circumstances – a widow without immediate survivors – it made sense. Knowing Dottie, it made perfect sense. As Rebecca recalled, “He understood completely what she had in mind.”
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For that matter, any friend of Dottie's knew exactly where she stood on racism. Some forty years earlier, she had published “Arrangement in Black and White,” a story shocking at the time, in which an African American singer (thought to be Paul Robeson) is subtly humiliated at an all-white cocktail party.

Throughout her life, Dottie had mismanaged her finances more often than not. But in organizing her death, the four-page will was a model of simplicity. Lillian Hellman was appointed executor of the estate (but did not share in the monetary award). Alternate executor was Seymour Bricker, the Los Angeles entertainment lawyer who had put Alan's affairs in order. She had a soft spot for young Bricker who was responsible for her return to New York with money in her pocket (more than $300,000 in current dollars).

Following the main order of business came instructions for funeral arrangements, in which she directed that “my body be cremated and that there be no funeral services, formal or informal.” Otherwise, in keeping with her lack of religious beliefs or affiliation, there were no further mandates, for example, no guidance concerning disposal of the ashes – buried, scattered – but that was not unusual.

Having finally drawn up the will, she was in an unusually cheerful mood. Yukking up her forthcoming demise, she joked to friends that the least she could do was kick the bucket. Not to a soul did she reveal the actual contents of the will, and for that matter she did not bother to inform Lilly that she had finally put her affairs in order.

Interestingly, when the contents did become public, it was not the choice of King that would startle her friends; it was appointing Lilly as executor. It seemed inappropriate, Ruth Goetz said, “because she had not really been a friend to Dottie” in recent years.
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Why did she do it? “I can tell you why,” one of Hellman's biographers declared. “Because Hellman was a shrewd businesswoman.”
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To Dottie, the decision was merely practical. Lilly was a hard-nosed manager of her own affairs, and she also controlled Hammett's estate after appropriating both the book revenues and the copyrights from his daughters. In her view, this was nothing but fair because she had tended him in his last years and considered herself the rightful owner, not two young women who lacked administrative skills.

•

By the winter of 1965 – almost a year after returning to the city – Dottie's health had improved; the maddening nurse was finally gone. After those dark days, she was tickled to be out and about in the neighborhood, eager for some semblance of a normal life. At Zitomer Pharmacy she bought toothpaste and ordered her medicines; she clumped past the galleries and consulates on Madison Avenue, past the corner where the new Whitney Museum was rising like a dour gray UFO above the townhouses. Some days she wandered up to the Carlyle, the hotel where Marilyn Monroe snuck in to see the president, and there Dottie occasionally allowed herself a forbidden cocktail at Bemelmans Bar. Surrounded by streamlined young women trotting by in miniskirts and boots, she looked like a sack of potatoes in her dark silk dresses and sensible walking shoes. It was an outfit she once wouldn't have been caught dead wearing, but she had to watch her pennies. She feared running out of money and decided to move to a smaller, cheaper apartment on the sixth floor.

In the evenings she enjoyed going out but complained of receiving few quality invitations. Once there was a swanky concert and the promise of an introduction to Jacqueline Kennedy, whom she adored, but Jackie failed to show up. Another time, she found herself excluded from Truman Capote's Black and White Ball, a slight that caused her to stew for weeks even though she understood that such snubs had become inevitable.

Again and again, doctors had warned her to give up alcohol, a cruel punishment in her view, but she made sporadic efforts at sobriety. To celebrate her seventy-second birthday, Sid and Laura Perelman threw a party that brought out many old friends. Clinking glasses with Heywood Hale Broun, she said, “Do you know what this is? Ginger ale.”
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It was pathetic. Back in the day her old self could happily party all night long on bathtub gin, cheap rotgut whiskey, homemade absinthe, cough syrup, indeed, when the spirit moved her, practically any liquid in a bottle.

•

A Victorian chair from
The Little Foxes
graced Lilly's cool green and yellow living room on East Eighty-second Street while other rooms showcased furniture from
The Children's Hour
and
The Autumn Garden
. This collection of antique-shop memorabilia, which included a quaint Sheraton-Hepplewhite birdcage, was a daily reminder of how high she had risen since the days when she was Lil Kober and first met the legendary wittiest woman in America.

Except that, in real life, age and illness will eventually upend a talent for bon mots, something that Lilly was reluctant to acknowledge. A high adrenaline woman, she found Dottie's physical deterioration terrifying.

Although the Volney catered to all ages, its predominance of seniors – and the ticking-clock atmosphere – sometimes gave the impression of an old folks' home. Apartment 6F, a claustrophobic nest where even a short visit could be uncomfortable, alarmed Lilly. In Dottie's living room, cluttered with unread issues of the
New York Times
and an assortment of dog toys, the poodle constantly barked and jumped on guests. Newspapers carpeted the bathroom floor.
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Peter Feibleman tells a story about how he was puzzled seeing, on several occasions, the September 9, 1965, issue flattened to an obituary of the actress Dorothy Dandridge. He finally figured out the reason: the poodle, he said, “peed in the living room and shit behind the sofa.” Squeamish callers learned to pick their way around.