The Last Days of Dorothy Parker (8 page)

The person she rarely saw was Lilly. What was to be their last visit took place in March 1967, right before Lilly trooped off to the Soviet Union. There was a postcard, mailed during a stopover in Paris, in which she nostalgically referred to their long-ago visit (that would be 1937) to the city and promised to phone when she got back. In Peter Feibleman's memoir of Hellman, he writes that the two never saw each other again after Dottie returned to New York, but the details of the Paris postcard prove otherwise. It is one of two such pieces of correspondence in Hellman's papers; the other is an undated telegram from Lilly in Vineyard Haven to Dottie in Hollywood, wishing her a happy birthday.

Dottie's most devoted friend was Beatrice Stewart, a onetime Santa Barbara debutante who used to be married to Dottie's writer pal Donald Ogden Stewart in the twenties, back when Dottie was still married to Eddie Parker. They knew each other well enough, after forty years, to put up with pretty much everything. Bea had two sons with Stewart before their divorce (in 1937), then became the third wife of Leo Tolstoy's grandson, a U.S. citizen who had built Marineland in Florida. The marriage did not last.

In
The Ladies of the Corridor
and the short story “I Live on Your Visits” appear pathologically needy mothers who smother their sons, thinly disguised portraits of Bea (embellished with a pinch of Alan's exasperating mother, Hortense). Bea, however, had refused to connect the dots, either unable to recognize herself or perhaps had simply decided to forgive Dottie. Those works were written a dozen years ago. Now it was 1967 and both of them were alone, husbands dead or alive or lost to Karl Marx, living with their poodles, doing their best.

Every few days or so, Dottie trudged the eight blocks to Bea's apartment on East Eightieth Street, where they would have dinner together. Pecking at the food and smoking, she could spend an entire evening expounding on the endless indignities of her life. When it was time to leave, she would open her purse and say, “What am I going to do about taxis?”
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A person like herself did not accept handouts, so when Bea offered a dollar or two, Dottie always said she really shouldn't take it. Then she always did.

She had been raised to never speak of money, but her situation by this time had grown worrisome. Royalties and permissions were steady but modest, and options for dramatizations occasional and unprofitable. There was no money for luxuries like party gowns and cabs, despite rigorous scrimping. For that matter, after buying staples – mostly, Scotch and Chesterfields – she had little left over.

Unfortunately, taxis had become a necessity. Unsteady on her feet after several bad spills, she took special care about walking on the street in the dark. Nobody knew that her eyesight had gotten much worse. She continued to have the
Times
delivered, but reading it was a struggle.

Bea scolded her. “What the devil have you done with your glasses?”

Useless, she told her. “I can't see anyway.”

•

Late Wednesday afternoon, June 7, 1967, a Volney desk clerk phoned Bea Stewart. “She's gone,” he announced.

Gone? Bea had dinner with Dottie just the other day, but there was no mention of going anywhere.

No, no, said the clerk. A chambermaid found Mrs. Parker in her bedroom. She was dead.

This kind of news, not normal but not all that rare in a hotel with numerous elderly occupants, was presumably broken in a professional manner. Bea, composed, replied that something had to be done about Dottie's poodle. A dog owner herself, she told the clerk to remove Troy from the apartment. She would hurry right over to pick him up.

When Bea got to the Volney, 6F was an apartment in transition, perfectly calm just hours earlier and suddenly a hive of activity. Lying in the bedroom was Dottie, who, as accurately described by the desk clerk, had gone. In the living room, police officers and firefighters busied themselves filling out forms and asking questions about next of kin. Hotel employees pushed in and out while curious neighbors gathered in the corridor.

For a while Bea lingered. Nobody was guarding the door. In the apartment were books and knickknacks, a closet of clothing, Dottie's desk and typewriter, everything that remained of the house in Norma Place. What was to prevent vandals from pilfering whatever they fancied? Not that valuables were in view, but there was no accounting for souvenir hunters. They were not the sort of people likely to show much respect.

Finally, there was nothing to wait for, and so Bea took the dog and slipped into the hum of evening traffic on Madison Avenue.
102

(1967)

For her half a century as a writer, Dottie was rewarded with the equivalent of a gold watch: a front-page obituary in the
New York Times
.

DOROTHY PARKER, 73, LITERARY WIT, DIES

The New York Times
, Thursday, June 8, 1967, Page 1

By Alden Whitman

Dorothy Parker, the sardonic humorist who purveyed her wit in conversation, short stories, verse and criticism, died of a heart attack yesterday afternoon in her suite at the Volney Hotel, 23 East 74th Street. She was 73 years old and had been in frail health in recent years.

The prominence of the obituary startled some. There were those who found it remarkable because they had thought she was already dead, while others, including a few of her dearest friends, were secretly jealous. Did she really deserve such an honor? After all, she owed her reputation to work first written in the twenties. Had she not been resting pretty much on her laurels lately?

But after the backbiting and the whispers died down, everyone donned their sympathy faces and turned up at Frank E. Campbell's funeral home. In her will, Dottie had stipulated no funeral service, formal or informal. Reading between the lines allowed for no prayers, blessings, or eulogies, no jibber jabber of any kind. Her scenario, simple as it was efficient, amounted to a suitable farewell for a devout atheist.

Within hours of her passing, however, Lilly lost no time arranging a funeral, small but nice, including the selection of the Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper party outfit as a shroud. Of course there were other friends who might have volunteered – Bea Stewart for one – but once Lilly had accepted responsibility and began issuing orders, the rest backed away. Obviously, as the presumed executor, it was her right, if not her responsibility.

Dashiell Hammett, who had looked upon rituals of any kind with horror, insisted that he did not want a funeral, traditional or otherwise. When he died six years earlier, Lilly dressed him in a tuxedo, delivered a heartfelt eulogy, and buried him in Arlington National Cemetery. Dash just didn't know he wanted a funeral. Likewise, Dottie's wishes were of no consequence either. The decisions fell to Lilly who began making phone calls, notified Campbell's, and saw that the ceremony would be covered by local papers. Decisive as usual, she handled the funeral without emotion.

•

In the days when Dottie first lived at the Volney, in the early fifties, the sight of what seemed like five hundred old ladies under one roof had moved her to a grim thought. What if she died in this Madame Tussauds? The passenger elevator was too narrow to accommodate a gurney, and the service elevator was used to collect trash. The hotel, she told Quentin Reynolds, a journalist also living there, really ought to construct a chute between one of its upper floors and Campbell's, several blocks away. It was the ideal solution. “We'd arrive in good condition and the trip would take a minute.”
103
Prophetically, she did indeed die at the Volney, and her body did indeed go to Campbell's. Not by chute of course.

On a very hot Friday, Dottie's friends gathered one last time. Anticipating a modest turnout, Lilly had bypassed the main chapel and scheduled the service for a small private room that seated around eighty. The event brought out an impressive showing of literary and theater lions – Arnold Gingrich of
Esquire
, Dorothy Schiff of the
Post
, Thomas Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer of Viking, writers Arthur Kober and Charles Jackson, S. J. Perelman, actors Zero Mostel, Maureen Stapleton, and Jack Gilford – joined by dozens of fans and gawkers. While Wyatt Cooper showed up, Gloria was preoccupied with the arrival of their second son, Anderson Hays, born the previous weekend. The small flower-filled chapel was soon jammed, and half the nearly 150 mourners had to stand in the hall and crane their necks.

Initially, a violinist played Bach's “Air on a G String,” and then Lilly stood up and read a twenty-minute remembrance praising her friend as “a great lady.” In a solemn voice, she said that “she was part of nothing and nobody but herself. It was this independence of mind and spirit that was her true distinction.” Twice referring to Dottie's final years, she mentioned her being “brave in deprivation, in the chivying she took during the McCarthy days, to the isolation of the last, bad, sick years.” She tried relating a joke, saying that Dottie had wanted this epitaph on her tombstone: “If you can read this, you've come too close.”

Next, Zero Mostel stepped forward. The barrel-chested comic actor, blacklisted in the fifties, recipient of a Tony Award for
Fiddler on the Roof
in the sixties, was not going to pretend when the service was a farce. “It was Dorothy's express wish that there be no formal ceremonies at all,” he said. Having summed up the situation economically, he repeated the remark she had made to him after signing her will, that all she had to do then was kick the bucket. “If she had had her way, I suspect she would not be here at all.”

Zero sat down. Another rendition of “Air on a G String” closed the service, which had clocked in at thirty-five minutes.

On the sidewalk, the mourners seemed in no rush to leave. Without any particular evidence of moistened eyes, they treated the funeral as a social occasion, clustered around wisecracking as they conducted a postmortem in the heat. Almost as if Dottie were leaning down from a cloud, they riffed about whether she would have liked it. Nobody thought so.

To Sid Perelman, the program went on far too long. He was sure Dottie's foot would have been tapping because “she had a very short fuse.” Naturally, Lil's attempt to reproduce her wit fell flat. Her best lines, he said, could not be repeated in any eulogy because they were obscene.

There was no shortage of hilarity over Lilly's chutzpah, how she capped her disgraceful neglect of recent years with a soiree Dottie didn't want. Worse, her stage-managing of the funeral, a paint-by-the-numbers affair, was especially inappropriate. Bea Stewart thought that Dottie would have “HOWLED at the way Lillian Hellman decided to run the show.” She would've died on the spot had she been forced to watch. It was goofy sidewalk shtick that would not have amused Lilly.

Eventually, everybody went home.
104

On their way back to their farm in Bucks County, Sid and Laura Perelman were not likely thinking about Dottie's remains; neither was this a concern of the new father Wyatt Cooper or any other mourner. Everybody assumed that Lilly would take care of the remaining details.

•

Ferncliff Cemetery is situated along a silent country road in the village of Hartsdale, New York, a twenty-five-mile drive north of Manhattan. Established in the early days of the twentieth century, Ferncliff is not a traditional burial place. There are no upright headstones in its seventy-acre park, only markers flush with the ground. Equally distinctive is its mausoleum, a climate-controlled, museumlike palace of gorgeous stained-glass windows and Oriental rugs, whose marble corridors resonate with the sounds of soothing nondenominational hymns; here are entombed the likes of Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Paul Robeson, and Moss Hart. That weekend of June 10, the cardboard container with Dottie's body arrived at Ferncliff.

In 1967, it was a popular destination for deceased New Yorkers desiring cremation because it was – and still is – the only crematory in Westchester County. One luminary who would be cremated there, thirteen years later, was John Lennon, whose ashes were claimed by Yoko Ono. For the lesser-known, next of kin could remove their loved one's ashes or arrange interment in the Ferncliff mausoleum or its special cremation garden.

Dottie's cremation expenses were to be paid out of her cash on hand along with other unpaid bills. Since no provision had been made for purchase of an urn, the ashes were sealed in a container resembling a coffee can. Also unknown were her wishes about a burial site for the cremated remains, information that is sometimes noted in a will, but sometimes not. In her case, this would prove a serious omission.

•

Despite the cracks from Dottie's gang of borscht-belt wiseguys, Lilly, out of the goodness of her heart, had made sure she got a funeral she deserved. Her eulogy had characterized Dottie as a person who “never spoke of old glories, never repeated old defeats, never rested on times long gone.” To remember her was to step back in time and think of the two of them together, the late nights when Dottie would be sipping watered Scotch and then peel off her ladylike manners and let loose with jokes that made Lilly shriek with laughter.

Suffice it to say, the spoilsports at Campbell's had allowed her to assume the burden of Dottie's exit without bothering to lift a finger. Unknown to those clowns, she had been walking around in a daze ever since reading the will. Nothing had prepared her for the contents.

For a very long time, she had expected to be named literary executor, and she also assumed she would be Dottie's sole heir, the person who would receive the copyrights, royalties, and contract rights, all the cash and negotiable securities, plus the proceeds of a trust fund. To her astonishment, she learned that even though the executorship remained hers, the estate would go to Martin Luther King Jr. and someday to the NAACP.

Trying to put on a good face, she took pains to tell the
Times
that she was “very impressed.”
105
As far as she knew, Mrs. Parker was “the first white person who ever did this,” explaining that the gift was surely extraordinary but also completely in character. “She had very strong feelings about civil liberty and Negro rights.” Unfortunately, any deeper insights into the decision would be conjecture because “she never spoke of her will.” Left unspoken were her private feelings about the legatee.

In the summer of 1963, she had been in Washington covering the civil rights march for the
Ladies' Home Journal
. Her piece, “Sophronia's Grandson Goes to Washington,” took an offbeat angle on the historic demonstration, however. Instead of a straightforward report, she penned a personal account that incorporated her Southern background and the family of her childhood nurse. The daylong program on the National Mall – long-winded speeches, music, rah-rah hoopla – eventually grew tiresome, and she began to wilt. It was, she decided, like a VIP funeral that goes on too long.

Martin Luther King, kind man that he must be, nevertheless reminded her of grandiloquent Southern preachers from her youth. By the time he rose to begin his “I Have a Dream” speech, she felt thoroughly bored, she later admitted, and soon wandered away to find something to eat. She had heard it all before.

If Dr. King in one of his finest moments failed to bowl her over, his position as new owner of Dottie's estate impressed her less.

To be sure, she and Dottie usually had quite different views on men. Alan had maddened her, obviously, and even though the relations between Dash and Dottie appeared cordial, Lilly claimed that he did not like her one bit. Once again, something similar was happening. The man to whom Dottie foolishly entrusted her future earnings – her legacy perhaps – was a person who failed to interest Lilly. This of course was Dottie's decision, and there was nothing to be done about it. Still, she felt hurt and betrayed.

Among her friends Lilly bristled with rage. To Howard Teichmann, in a thundering diatribe that the playwright later repeated to a biographer, she cursed her as “that goddamn bitch.”
106
It was unbelievable because “I paid her hotel bill at the Volney for years, kept her in booze, paid for her suicide attempts – all on the promise that when she died she would leave me the rights to her writing. But what did she do? She left them directly to the NAACP. Damn her!”

Lilly had paid for none of these things, of course, and Dottie certainly did not make the NAACP her heir.

In her view, Dottie had made a promise and broken it. Maybe so. But what, exactly, was the agreement? True to her word, Dottie did in fact appoint Lilly as her executor. But it is one thing to be executor and another to inherit the estate. Whether she had additionally assured her of pocketing the rights as well is based entirely on Lilly's say-so. In any case, Lilly did not take advantage of the provision allowing her to decline the position of executor in favor of Dottie's alternate choice, the Los Angeles attorney Seymour Brick.

Lilly's wrath seemed directed less at the civil rights hero personally than at his organization, which she found timorous, ineffectual, and behind the times. Some years afterward, in a calmer mood, she was to say, “It's one thing to have real feeling for black people, but to have the kind of blind sentimentality about the NAACP, a group so conservative that even many blacks now don't have any respect for, is something else.” The only explanation, she liked to say, was that “Dottie must have been drunk when she did it.”
107

In the meantime, at his headquarters in Atlanta, Dr. King expressed surprise and gratitude. Of course he had never met Parker, and in all likelihood had never heard of her before, but he rose to the occasion. What impressed him, he said, was that “one of America's most respected and warmly loved women of letters felt so committed to the civil rights movement that whatever she had she offered to it.”
108

•

Along with control of Dottie's work, Lilly would be obliged to deal with less appealing tasks that demanded immediate decisions. The
Times
had to be canceled, cartons of books taken away, payments issued to the Volney ($385.17) and Zitomer Pharmacy ($23.92), and on top of everything, the hotel wanted 6F vacated by the end of July. And who was supposed to remove Dottie's personal belongings? Was that the concern of an executor?

In this case it was.

Opening drawers, she discovered several uncashed checks dating back to 1960, confirming her suspicions of Dottie's financial ineptitude. In the bedroom closet hung all the clothing she owned, poor soul, none of it first-rate. The furniture belonged to the hotel; there were scarcely any kitchen utensils, not surprising given her disinterest in food. (Room service delivered her meals.) Lilly always knew that she had few possessions, but she was shocked to see how few. “Nobody ever left fewer accumulations,” she thought.
109
She could not help thinking it pitiful. A classic pack rat herself, she needed multiple homes, both a city townhouse and a country residence, to store her copious things. But if she was a hoarder, she was also a sensible hoarder who believed in recycling. She routinely weeded out unused items for donation to the Irvington House Thrift Shop on Second Avenue.