[Dorothy Parker 01] - The Broadway Murders

by Agata Stanford

  On the subject of his sexual relations with women, no one is quite sure, although his claim to having contracted the mumps when he was twenty is a handy excuse for his celibacy, and, as he assumes we know what that implies, nothing more needs be said of the matter.

  Groucho Marx once asked Aleck about his time in the army during the war.

  “Tell us, Aleck,” he asked, “when you were in France, did you get laid?”

  Aleck considered the question, and then replied, “Infinitesimally.”

  A mean-spirited fellow, who shall remain nameless, blurted out that Aleck was “a fag who just never got caught.” Whether asexual or homosexual, it would not lessen my great esteem for the man. Anyway, the truth be told, half the people in the Theatre are homosexual; the other half are just plain psychotic—with the Marx Brothers and John Barrymore on the psychotic side. But, I think Aleck is body conscious, and too shy (believe it or not, for all his bravado!) to indulge in physical intimacy. And I can see beyond his vitriol that he possesses a deep fear of rejection, in spite of the face of confidence he shows the world.

  I’ve never known anyone like Aleck. He is at once both male companion and gossipy girlfriend to me. George Kaufman summed him up most succinctly when he described Aleck as “improbable.” And that is exactly what he is: singular.

  We discussed “The Case.” I think it was that evening that we first referred to the murder of Reginald Pierce as “The Case.” In spite of Aleck’s very logical concerns about safety, and the obstruction of justice through our meddling, we were drawn to the task of solving the murder of the producer. And we were certain, in our guts, at least, that Lucille’s murder was connected.

  “Do you think the understudy murdered Lucille?” I asked.

  “What, because she was hungry for a part in a play?” said Mr. Benchley.

  “I’ve known actors who’d kill for a fava bean,” said Aleck.

  “The problem is this: If both murders are connected, why would the understudy have killed the producer of the show? Where would that get her? Why not just knock-off the star?”

  From my evening purse I took out the short list of suspects and the objects taken from Lucille’s apartment. “All right, let’s consider each suspect. Who on this list stands to gain the most from RIP’s death?”

  The boys glanced at the list.

  “The wife, for his money.”

  “Gerald Saches, because with Reggie out of the way, he can move in on Myrtle.”

  “Or, the mistress, Marion Fields. She gets revenge on Reggie for not divorcing his wife. But, she inherits nothing, so it is a rather vacuous reason to kill.”

  “You don’t think revenge is enough? Ever see Hamlet?”

  “If she did do it, she needed help. Reginald was a big man, and she is a tiny bit of a thing. We’ll find out in the morning just how he was murdered.”

  “What was she doing with Wilfred Harrison, huddled in clandestine conversation?” I asked, rhetorically.

  “Are you so certain it was anything more than an innocent encounter?” said Mr. Benchley.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t innocent. And then there is the mysterious Oriental driving ‘Ralph Shittenham.’ ” (I knew what I’d said.)

  “What we need to do is find the connection to RIP among all the suspects. One of them had to have had some motive, albeit some secret motive, for wanting both Reginald and Lucille dead,” said Mr. Benchley. A look of puzzlement crossed his features, and then he said, “Unless Lucille was killed by someone else, for reasons unconnected to Reggie, and the murderer wanted it to look as if the same person killed them both.”

  “We won’t know unless we delve into the lives of each victim and each suspect to find a link or a motive so compelling it eliminates everybody else.”

  Aleck looked at me and then over his glasses at Mr. Benchley. “Just make sure he or she doesn’t eliminate you.”

  “You know, Aleck,” said Mr. Benchley, “I’ve reconsidered: You’re not a wife; you’re a real mother.”

  If Alexander Woollcott and Robert Benchley are a bit . . . unusual, the members of the Algonquin Round Table might be described as an odd menagerie of contrasting talents and personalities: writers, journalists, theatre people, but artists, all—Jascha Heifetz and Irving Berlin; Harpo Marx and Robert Sherwood. Our commonality is our luncheon club, our notorious wit, and the great joy we share in each other’s company every day. I believe our enthusiasm to be together comes from our neurotic, yet endearing, need to belong to a family. Many of our members have come to New York from other places to build careers, and there is the natural desire to seek the emotional acceptance families provide. So it is not unusual for us to meet at the Gonk for our one o’clock luncheon as often as six days a week, and later, at five-ish for cocktails in my rooms or at Tony Soma’s, or at Neysa’s studio, and then, if there isn’t a play to review or a deadline, on to supper.

  Then there is the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club, a poker game that has been meeting for years every Saturday night. It is not unusual for the games to continue on into Sunday evening, or even into Monday morning! The marathon card games have recently been moved from a room at the Algonquin to the home of Jane Grant and Harold Ross, a residence that they purchased with Aleck on West 46th Street. I rarely attend, unless it is to commiserate with Jane.

  When one of us is separated from the group for more than a few days, he or she suffers withdrawal symptoms. Like members of any family, we don’t always get along; we have our “moments,” but the bond of our friendships is stronger than any gripe that might threaten to tear us asunder.

  Back a few years, in June of 1919, Robert Sherwood and Robert Benchley, alongside whom I worked at Vanity Fair, were invited to a luncheon to welcome back from the War Alexander Woollcott, the new drama critic at the New York Times. A select group of newspaper journalists and editors were invited to the free lunch. As the two “Bobs”—we got to calling Sherwood, “Sherry,” to end confusion in the office—and I usually spent our lunch hours together, they insisted I tag along with them to the welcome luncheon.

  The meal was set in the Rose Room of the new residential Algonquin Hotel on 44th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. I was the only woman at the table, and although I would never allow anyone to believe I was intimidated by the mental brawn of a room full of men, I sat quietly, observing the competitive verbal gymnastics of the masculine participants. I remember remaining very still as I took in the playful cadence of their comments, their pungent but humorous insults, a sort of rebirth for our modern times of the old men’s club parlance. Nothing was sacred, and they did not edit for the benefit of my feminine ears. These men, a motley assortment of unsavory-looking characters, whom I never would have sought out for friendship under ordinary circumstances, accepted little me without prejudice, and I in turn became devoted to them. When just the right moment arrived for me to add my voice, I made a little comment (I haven’t the foggiest idea what I actually said!), and owing to the riotous reception, I was instantly admitted into their exclusive club.

  Aleck’s cutting wit set the tone of the luncheon, and everyone present was very young and ambitious and yearning for acceptance from his peers and the world at large, in a city that each was desperate to conquer. Spirits were high, the high-jinks ongoing, and in spite of the icy glares from surrounding diners, the manager, Frank Case, tolerated our noisy exuberance. He saw that we were babes in the concrete woods of Manhattan. He must have seen the flash of brilliance evident in the prodigies, felt the rising pulse of creativity energizing the room, because instead of throwing us out, he banked on our success and built from it a living legend—born in the Rose Room of the Algonquin Hotel. They say eating a good breakfast keeps you healthy, but I never knew that eating lunch would make us famous!

  Aleck made comment that the luncheon was so much fun all the “fellas” should do it on a regular basis. And being one of the “fellas,” I was invited to join the boys the following week.


  Soon it became a daily function of the restaurant to see us arrive at one o’clock, and for Frank Case to seat us near the entrance of the dining room, right off the lobby, for all passersby to see. Frank figured that other people would be encouraged to lunch there, too, just to hear the names of famous people being tossed about the room from our table. He assigned to us our own waiter, Luigi, and because most of us were so poor back then, our table was graced with baskets of popovers and celery stalks, compliments of the house. Scrambled eggs being the cheapest plate on the menu, I’d often have a half-order. We must have been quite a sight: Aleck dressed to the nines, his dinner bill alone more than the total of the ten or twelve others who happened to show up each day.

  There was Harold Ross, a fellow reporter Aleck met overseas during the War, whose wife, Jane Grant, a social columnist for the New York Times, cited him as “the homeliest creature she ever met”—a description compounded by Edna Ferber, who, upon first meeting Ross at a dinner party, believed him to be “a vagrant brought in by her dinner host as a joke,” saying the man looked like “a plucked woodchuck.” He did, actually, because of his bristle-brush head of hair, his feral, beady stare, and bucked front teeth. If Ross’s and Jane’s magazine, The New Yorker, takes off, they might fare well.

  FPA, one of the highest paid and most widely read columnists for the New York Tribune, has a rumpled face, long neck, small head, and a bulbous nose, and is often mistaken for a particular moose head hanging over the hearth of an Adirondack sanatorium.

  Groucho Marx never wears his ridiculous fake mustache offstage, but he does enjoy raiding the costume master’s domain for unusual evening wear. His velvety baritone rolls out a nasal Manhattan sing-song of pure silliness. As for Harpo (Adolph), there is nothing quiet about him.

  With us, too, is Heywood Broun, sport columnist, social and political commentator, and jazz maniac, who writes for the World. He is big, bulky, brilliant, and endearing. His suits are as rumpled as FPA’s face.

  I dress in a very ladylike fashion, have impeccable manners, and speak in dulcet, finishing-school tones, but have a propensity for off-colored humor and dropping numerous four-letter words into everyday conversation.

  Robert Benchley, Harvard man, past editor of the Harvard Lampoon, and star of the Hasty Pudding shows, is the kindest of souls, truly interested in people and universally loved by all who meet him. He is the model of class, integrity, and masculine beauty. He can listen to the most mundane story told by a bore at a dinner party, and leave the storyteller with the newfound belief that he is the cleverest fellow in the world, next to Bob Benchley. I often feel that we, our friends and I, have corrupted him. When we first met, Mr. Benchley neither smoked nor drank; he was a real little White Ribboner! But, I, too, had been no different from Mr. Benchley, until I found how much more bearable life could be with a little bathtub gin smoothing over my orange juice. I suppose the reasons why we drink are different for each of us. I drink because it makes me less miserable. Mr. Benchley drinks because it makes him even happier!

  George S. Kaufman is rangy, pompadoured, and, at the time of our first meeting, Aleck’s assistant at the New York Times. He is at once both a handsome and grotesque figure, sexy and flamboyantly attired, with a smile that dazzles. Impeccable in all things, during the five years of our friendship George has co-authored that many hit plays, amassed a small fortune, acquired an extravagant apartment, and yet guards his seventy-five-dollar-a-week job at the Times as if his success and fame might evaporate at any moment. The best card player of the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club, usually winning the hand he’s dealt, he is the happiest of any of the married men at our table, freely admitting to not having bedded his wife Bea for five years, and convinced that their relationship has improved because of it!

  Then there’s Marc Connolly, reporter-turned-playwright, who is as short, fair, and bald as his collaborator, George Kaufman, is tall, dark, and hairy. They are as different as night and day, and yet, together they are the sun and the moon over Broadway. Marc is the antithesis of George. If one tried to measure success in relation to effort, one would never guess that this young man is one of the laziest people in town. How Marc manages to produce such fine work with such little effort is a talent in itself. After his first hit show, Marc promptly quit his reporter’s job with the Morning Telegraph, wanting to travel leisurely through Europe with his mother, with whom he lived, and remains living with at the time of this writing. George, who lives for his work, is frustrated at his collaborator’s disinterest in finishing the last act of their play. Upon hearing that a novel by Charles Dickens was to be posthumously published, he noted that “Charles Dickens, dead, writes more than Marc Connelly, alive!”

  As for Bunny (Edmond) Wilson: When we first met, he was a pale, round-faced, balding, russet-headed boy of twenty-four; a Princeton man returned from the War, he was eager to make his mark as a writer. I discovered one of his story submissions when I was wading through the slush pile at Vanity Fair. He was as timid as a virgin; in fact he was a virgin, and probably still is, although ever-ready, for in his pocket he’s been carrying the same condom he carried on the day we first met, five years ago. (Don’t ask me how I know this.)

  Bunny carries a torch for Vincent—Edna Millay, that is, who is, in my opinion, a second-rate poet who doesn’t deserve the devotion my Bunny bestows upon her. Why do nice men waste their love on such mean women? I’m very protective of Bunny, and the fact that he dislikes Condé Nast as much as any sensible person should only endears him to my heart! He will move on to greater things, I am sure. A more honest man, there isn’t.

  At the beginning we had been dubbed “the greatest collection of unsalable wit in the country.” But, after a little time, thanks to FPA, who dined with us every day and was a regular companion going to first nights with Aleck, and in whose column, The Conning Tower, were chronicled all the people he’d met throughout his day, we became known to all New Yorkers as the models of wit and sophistication.

  Now, five years after our first luncheon, there are few clever remarks that haven’t been attributed to any one of us, but I have to admit many of my witticisms go unpublished because they are, well, quite frankly, unpublishable.

  But, I digress. There are many more stories I will tell about at a later time, like Robert Sherwood and the midgets, Heywood Broun and the dime, and Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda and the magnum of champagne.

  This afternoon, after suffering the effects of too little sleep and too much champagne, Woodrow Wilson and I were met in the Algonquin lobby by a very excited Alexander Woollcott.

  After guiding me to a quiet corner, he pulled out of his coat a sheaf of papers. He shuffled through pages and then pointed at one particular line.

  “Asphyxiation?”

  “The cherry tomato was to make it look like he choked to death,” said Aleck.

  “That narrows the field of suspects. Whoever killed Reginald had to have known about the tomato allergy.”

  “Yes, I doubt the placing of a tomato in his airway was a coincidence,” he agreed.

  “I don’t believe in coincidences. That’s the only possible proof I might entertain that there may be some sort of meaning to our crazy existence on earth: not accepting the concept of coincidences.”

  “You’re waxing metaphysical, Dottie; it doesn’t suit you.”

  I searched through the coroner’s report for any possible clue toward identifying the murderer. “No marks on his body, so he wasn’t pushed around or beaten before he was killed. I don’t see anything that indicates how he was suffocated.”

  “The coroner found a feather in his hair. Goose feather.”

  “A pillow.”

  “Likely. And the clothes he was found in? He didn’t dress himself.”

  “The autopsy could figure that out? Amazing.”

  “Not amazing; common sense. The way his shirt was tucked, and his tie was done up by someone facing him to do the task. Same with the way his shoes were tied;
they found fingerprints on his shoes that were not his. He was killed a few hours after midnight; he was found at 7:30.”

  “Having a breakfast of steak, potatoes, and—don’t you think that kind of a meal at that hour—” I forgot for a moment with whom I was speaking. Aleck would eat a five-course meal at three in the morning. But Reginald Pierce probably wouldn’t; he was reed thin, and long suffered gastric distresses. He was the poached-egg-on-dry-toast sort of guy. I said, “Perhaps someone wanted it to look like he was having a late supper, to make it appear as if he died earlier in the evening. Who found him?”

  “The maid.”

  “Live in?”

  “No. Comes in at seven in the morning. That last page is the statement she gave the police. Joe thought we’d like to see it. Maid came in at seven, got coffee started, washed a few plates in the sink, her usual routine. She found Reggie a half-hour later.”

  “We’ve got to talk to this woman,” I said. “There’s nothing in this report that tells us much about how she found the place when she arrived. I mean, had the bed been slept in? The icebox was nearly empty of food when we raided it the other night; had the maid thrown out anything? Was dinner delivered from a restaurant? Did the police go through his garbage? When did they suspect foul play, after the coroner’s report?”

  “My head is reeling, dear,” said Aleck. “I have no answers for you.”

  Aleck looked up and over my shoulder. Mr. Benchley joined us, and I handed him the report.

  “Looks like we have our work cut out for us, Mrs. Parker, dear.”

  I handed the reports back to Aleck, who tucked them into his coat, and then the three of us walked toward the dining room to join the others for lunch. Just before we passed the threshold, I halted abruptly, touching Aleck’s arm.