The Last Days of Dorothy Parker (7 page)

Lilly could not begin to fathom why anybody would live this way. But of course it was much more than messy conditions; it was Dottie herself who had become a person she didn't know. “Poor Dottie,” she told people, so that they assumed Mrs. Parker must be out of it. One of Dottie's worshipful admirers, Nora Ephron, confessed that “all I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker.” But Lilly managed to convince her that her heroine was actually “a sad lady who misspent her life and her talent.”
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Despite Lilly's residence a few blocks north, she had kept her distance after Dottie's return from the Coast. Phone calls were sporadic, visits occasional and brief. Her appointment books were clogged with professional activities and a hectic social schedule. She was a memorable hostess and party-giver, and guests were eager to dine on her cooking, a main course like leg of venison served with sweet-and-sour cabbage and “some very good red wine,” followed by a mixture of lemon and pineapple sherbets with “a nice piece of cake that isn't too heavy.”
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She loved entertaining almost as much as she loved grumbling about the effort she had lavished on preparations, but nonetheless visitors to her immaculate townhouse could see how much attention she paid to the small details of life. On the menu at her gatherings was not only superior food – her default preoccupation – but the company of exceptional personalities brimming with witty repartee and dishing up the latest dirt. People down on their luck, momentarily or otherwise, were not likely to be invited.

Dottie, in her heyday the darling of Manhattan hostesses, no longer fit in, of course. Neither was she invited to Vineyard Haven, which was realistic because she was too frail to do much traveling and unable to keep up. Spending time with her was no fun anymore.

More distressing than Dottie's apartment was her drinking, which Peter Feibleman called “hard-core. Lilly couldn't take it.”
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Sober, Dottie was angelic. Under the influence, she could not resist the temptation to tell people what she thought of them. These outbursts made visitors uncomfortable, and Lilly was not the only one to shrink. As Ruth Goetz remembered it, an hour at the Volney could be “heavy-going.”
91
Well-intentioned guests felt obliged to rescue Dottie from herself by emptying Scotch bottles behind her back. Sometimes those who phoned found that the Volney switchboard had instructions to block incoming calls. If a person did manage to get through, Dottie could be needlessly defensive, leaving one gentleman gasping when she, a woman known for elegant manners, suddenly called him a Fascist son of a bitch.

Whenever Lilly turned up, Dottie seemed pleased to see her. “Oh, Lilly, come in quick. I want to laugh again.”
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Every time it was the same sweet smile, which naturally made Lilly feel a little guilty. In Dottie's place, she would have been far less gracious and said, “Where have you been?”

For Dottie, too, these indifferent reunions had become awkward because she knew full well that Lilly had dropped her. Unlike the old days, there was little to talk about, and so one of Lilly's duty visits required a certain amount of ladylike playacting.

There was no denying Lilly had a mean streak, and Dottie had witnessed countless blowups that caused people to cringe and run for cover. Once at Lilly's farm the two of them were inspecting the turtle cages when their conversation turned sour over some triviality. Spoiling for a fight, Lilly insisted that Dottie was lying to her.

Not so, Dottie answered, but clearly hoping to let it pass. At that moment a turtle's penis suddenly snapped to attention. Without missing a beat, Dottie said, “It must be pleasant to have sex appeal for turtles. Shall I leave you alone together?”
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“She had paid me back,” Lilly was to recall, “and all was well.” Or so she liked to think. Friends who loved her dearly tended to make allowances, and Dottie also forgave her thoughtless behavior.

Lilly, increasingly judgmental, looked down on Dottie for roads taken – or not taken – choices that usually involved money. As a self-made woman, she had considerable disdain for people whose irresponsible management of their finances left them muddling through without sufficient income but who nevertheless insisted upon living above their means. She decided Dottie was paying too much for her apartment, even the smaller one on the sixth floor. Cheaper quarters in a less expensive neighborhood would do just as well and cut down on her expenses. While she herself could be “foolishly extravagant” in some things, she knew how to economize and always bought secondhand typewriters.
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Instead of a desk, she worked at the dining room table. Dottie's problem, on the other hand, was that she still wanted to live like a queen.

But more significant to their friendship than money was the passage of time. The age gap, irrelevant for so many years, was no longer possible to bridge. Dottie was a slow-moving seventy-two-year-old, whereas Lilly was a trim, fit sixty-year-old still eager for trips to Russia, flirting with younger men and hoping for sex, and swimming naked as a jaybird at Gay Head beach and not caring who saw her.

Needy people made Lilly feel resentful. She had done her best to look out for Dash, whose physical health, weakened from alcoholism, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, lung cancer, depression, and imprisonment, made full-time care necessary. But he was not at all grateful and stoutly resisted her efforts until his death in 1961, which made her even more angry. Dottie, too, seemed like a burden, even though she asked for nothing. In the meantime, Lilly was flailing both personally and professionally. There was a terrific year in 1960 with
Toys in the Attic
, a meaty semiautobiographical work depicting her father's family. The companion piece to
The Little Foxes
received laudatory reviews and ran more than a year. However, her next venture bombed.
My Mother, My Father and Me
, an adaptation of a satiric novel, opened during a newspaper strike in 1963 and closed after seventeen performances. Despite her formidable gifts as a playwright, strike or no strike, it was not very good. What she called a comedy failed to entertain the critics, with the
New York Times
suggesting it was a mirthless “hymn of hate.”
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Another recent project, a Marlon Brando vehicle, had ended in personal mortification.
The Chase
, her first Hollywood assignment since being blacklisted, was an adaptation of a Horton Foote novel about brutality in a small Texas town. The job came at a painful time when she found herself consumed by the worst depression of her life, she recalled, a gush of bad feelings that had traveled with her since childhood. Director Arthur Penn, faced with a dysfunctional writer, ordered her script to be rewritten by Foote. An outstanding cast did not prevent mostly negative reviews labeling the film “in bad taste,” a jumble of violence, sensation, and clichés.
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Of all her disappointments, the most painful was falling in love with a man she believed a possible successor to Hammett. Blair Clark was a journalist, television producer (CBS News), and political activist twelve years younger than herself. A Harvard graduate, he was a handsome, wealthy patrician whose well-born friends numbered politicians (John F. Kennedy) and poets (Robert Lowell). There is no question he was uncommonly affectionate, with their relationship so close that they were viewed as a couple; in fact, some mistook them for lovers. A romantic Valentine's Day poem, in 1965, was titled “Lilly Pie, Baby” and began, “I love my Lillian.”
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Still, Clark was a divorced man who played the field and dated glamorous young women such as the newly widowed Jacqueline Kennedy. He felt no sexual attraction for Lilly.

The more he pushed her away, the greater her obsession; she wanted, not just sex, but matrimony. Clinging to her infatuation, Lilly deducted two years from her age, grieved over his rejection, and wrote heartachingly in her diary: “Blair – broken bad.”
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•

That winter of 1967, Wyatt Cooper brought over a tape recorder so that Dottie could reminisce about her life. For the love of God, she had the most horrible things happen in her childhood. It wasn't exactly
Little House on the Prairie
. The Rothschilds weren't normal – just a bunch of loudmouthed lunatics; and on her mother's side, the Marstons were Yankee terrorists who manufactured firearms. The last thing she wanted was to go on about her life, but she didn't want to disappoint Wyatt since she knew he was hoping to get a book contract out of it.

A mere four years before, the Sharecropper was living down the street from her in Norma Place, in somebody or other's garage apartment, aimlessly collecting unemployment. But the kid's life contained more plot twists than a Saturday-morning cartoon: he moved to New York and promptly married glamour girl Gloria Vanderbilt; as a result, he was currently dwelling in baronial splendor among the fat cats. He and the Heiress – whom Dottie privately called Gloria the Vth – were living in a townhouse on East Sixty-seventh Street with their two-year-old son, and another child was due in June.

Insisting that she was seventy-three and practically in her grave, she reluctantly agreed to the tapings because, looking on the bright side, his visits would perk up her day and maybe even “give me something to live for.” Sitting on her sofa, oblivious to the nervous yapping of her poodle, she lit up a Chesterfield as she waited for Wyatt to stop fiddling with the machine. “Let's make it gay,” she told him. “If it's not fun, there's no point in telling it.” Then she got started: the Jersey Shore, Woodlawn in the Bronx, Long Island, her homes on the Upper West Side where she had lived her first twenty-seven years, not forgetting the
Titanic
and her family's greatest tragedy.

It was stuff she had not spoken about, or even thought of, for more than half a century.
Mother died and Papa was not right in the head afterward. On Sundays he dragged the entire family to Woodlawn so that they could talk to Eliza. Papa decided to marry a crazy bitch from the neighborhood who conversed with Jesus. None of the children were nice to Eleanor so that she had a stroke one morning and died. Soon after came Rags and Nogi, and for a while, stupidly victorious, they had the dogs to make life worth living. There was the spring all those years ago when Papa's brother, poor Martin, died on the
Titanic.
Papa was wall to wall batty after that. And then he died. Naturally, it wrecked her but then she got the job playing piano at the dance studio.

The craziest things came floating back, such as the day when her brother passed her on the street and pretended not to know her. Even though both her brothers and her sister had died, nothing much had changed since 1907. She still saw herself as “just a little Jewish girl trying to be cute.”

After a couple of weeks she had to stop the sessions, disappointing Wyatt. She had tried very hard to continue, but it was no use; because, quite frankly, despite her best efforts she was straining for self-deprecating things to say. What she had most enjoyed about the tapings were the hours spent with her friend.
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Wyatt was Gloria Vanderbilt's fourth husband (her third, Leopold Stokowski, was fifty-eight years her senior), and everybody, Dottie included, found the new marriage baffling. Truman Capote considered her choice of Wyatt “a mystery. He certainly wasn't like anybody's father.”
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Wyatt let slip to Truman that during sex the Heiress “would scream over and over, Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” (which Capote leaked to his biographer), an enticing detail that would have lent itself, had Dottie known about it, to extensive clinical analysis.

Because the tapings had to be put aside, the Coopers decided to host a dinner party in her honor and made sure a great deal of care went into the guest list. By and by, acceptances arrived from an impressive roster of notable New Yorkers, among them several power couples – the Bennett Cerfs, the Bill Paleys, and the Martin Gabels (Dorothy Kilgallen). Dottie, excited, was also secretly irritated to learn that none of her friends would be there. The Coopers claimed that wasn't the point – the purpose was to invite interesting people she didn't know, ones she'd like to meet. Still, the way she saw it, her friends were not sufficiently chichi. Manufacturing an excuse to call the whole damn thing off, she said that she couldn't come because she had nothing to wear, which was actually the case. This posed no problem to the Heiress who sent her a yellow brocade dress trimmed with seed pearls, which was size 3 but still much too large and almost reached the floor. The gift necessitated a trip to Saks to purchase sparkly slippers and handbag, whose cost made a serious dent in her budget.

However much Dottie appreciated the Coopers' thoughtfulness, however great her affection for the Sharecropper, she nonetheless felt out of place among all those starchy, piss-elegant rich people. In the Cooper townhouse, a long dining table had been gaily set with a red tablecloth and vases filled with elaborate flower arrangements. No detail was overlooked by Dottie, who afterward described the party to her uninvited friends. Cutting straight to the heart of the matter, she offered an expert appraisal of the expensive wine goblets. Leave it to the Heiress to do things right, she said, because there wasn't a paper cup in sight.

•

For all her yelping about the exclusion of her people from the Coopers' guest list, it was not really important. As a person whose roots in the city went back to another century, she had a sizable social circle and routinely saw Sid and Laura Perelman, Kate and Zero Mostel, Jack and Madeline Gilford, Heywood Hale “Woodie” Broun, actresses like June Walker, writers like Quentin Reynolds, and playwright Ruth Goetz, whose father had staged Dottie's first play,
Close Harmony
, in 1924. Living in Dottie's building with a nurse-companion was her dear friend Sara Murphy, a Volney resident since her husband, Gerald, had died two years earlier.