Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  This is the kind of irony that can easily fold back on itself and become confusing: Is this humor about feminism, then still a relatively new concept? Or is it humor in the service of feminism? Or is it empty ridicule, with no kind of political purpose? To me, it appears to be all three. One of the great pleasures of irony like this is being able to watch it refract in different directions. At least a few of those directions were paths women could walk down. When this first issue was published in 1914, women couldn’t even vote. But because Crowninshield liked to poke fun, he needed writers with oppositional viewpoints, people who didn’t quite fit into the recognized bounds of propriety.

  A great many of that kind of writer also happened to be women. Anne O’Hagan, a suffragette, wrote about the alleged bohemianism of Greenwich Village. Clara Tice, an avant-garde illustrator who liked to claim she’d been the first woman ever to bob her hair, was an integral part of the magazine from the start. Marjorie Hillis, who by the 1930s had become an avatar of the single life for women everywhere, also published there in the early days of the magazine.

  Parker would become the signature voice of the magazine, but it took a while to install her there. Crowninshield’s eye was caught by a bit of light verse she’d submitted. The poem is called “Any Porch,” and its nine stanzas present themselves as overheard remarks, the idea being they could be heard on “any porch” of the largely well-to-do and slightly well-informed. Stylized and relying on the moral prejudices of an early twentieth-century high society, it’s a bit of a clunker to modern ears. But it already bore the marks of Parker’s future preoccupations: her acid read of the confines of femininity and her impatience with those who spoke only in the clichés of received wisdom:

  I don’t call Mrs. Brown bad,

  She’s un-moral, dear, not im- moral …

  I think the poor girl’s on the shelf

  She’s talking about her “career.”

  Crowninshield saw something in this. He paid her five or ten or twelve dollars for the poem. (Her account, his, and those of others all differ on the amount.) This small success emboldened her to ask him for a job. At first he could not wrangle a job for her at Vanity Fair proper, so he found a place for her at Vogue.

  It was not exactly an ideal fit. The Vogue of 1916 was a prim magazine for nice women with a lot of prim, nice writing in it. Parker wasn’t much interested in fashion, never had been. Yet at this magazine she found herself with a job that required her to hold passionate, almost religious views as to the merits of one fabric over another, as to the length of a hem. From her first days at the magazine she could not muster the energy. Late in life she’d try to present her memories politely. But she could not hide that she’d been as much a critic of her coworkers as she was of anything else. She told the Paris Review that the women at Vogue were “plain … not chic.” The compliments she had for them were never half so long as the insults:

  They were decent, nice women—the nicest women I ever met—but they had no business on such a magazine. They wore funny little bonnets and in the pages of their magazine they virginized the models from tough babes into exquisite little loves.

  Vogue was driven by the demands of the fledgling commercial clothing industry, a business that mostly pandered to and trivialized its customers. There was, even in this early period, a kind of marketing gloss to every article in the magazine, the copy always demanding the tone of a catalog. And with an admirable and wicked kind of prescience—it was still more than half a century before women would begin to revolt over the confines of dress—every move Parker made at Vogue undermined the idea that a beautiful outfit was the height of feminine sophistication.

  To be fair to Vogue, the couple of years spent marinating in a subject she so plainly felt beneath her focused Parker’s wit. The writer of “Any Porch” wielded a pen like a hammer. The duress at Vogue made her sly and subtle. When, for example, she was assigned to write captions for the pen-and-ink fashion illustrations that took up most of the real estate in Vogue’s pages, she would thread a very fine needle. She might find the subject indescribably stupid, but her wit had to be wielded so subtly that the editor in chief wouldn’t catch any hint of Parker’s condescension to Vogue’s readers. This filigree work led to some truly brilliant captions—such as the famous one that affirmed that “brevity is the soul of lingerie.” Others poked even lighter fun at the elaborate undercarriage fashion required:

  There is only one thing as thrilling as one’s first love affair; that is one’s first corset. They both give the same feeling of delightful importance. This one is planned to give something approaching a waistline to the straight sturdiness of the twelve-year-old.

  Her editors noticed. Some of Parker’s captions were rewritten when her disdain cut too clearly through the text. And even though Parker’s manners were apparently impeccable, Edna Woolman Chase, the coolheaded editor in chief of Vogue, called Parker “treacle-sweet of tongue but vinegar-witted” in her own memoirs. It seems important that Chase also noticed the way Parker’s bite was hidden in subterfuge, delivered with honey. It echoes the picture a later friend, the drama critic Alexander Woollcott, would draw of the young Parker: “So odd a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth.” Work simply poured out of Parker in those early years. She wrote almost as frequently for Vanity Fair as she did for Vogue, clearly angling for a job at the former. Vanity Fair just had more room for the kind of light, satirical, and more often than not forgettable verse that Parker seemed able to deliver by the gallon. She returned again and again to a form she called hate songs, light verse whose targets ran the gamut from women to dogs. Some of these could be quite funny, but mostly they took the form of raw complaint, and their harshness could grate. She did better when allowed to flesh out her talents at greater length in essays. Her vinegar wit did well when it was drawn out like that, a slow-acting acid eating away at the ridiculous subject. Her boredom, again, gave the pieces she was producing a finer edge.

  In a November 1916 issue of Vanity Fair, Parker explained her singleness in a piece titled “Why I Haven’t Married.” It was send-up of the New York dating scene, apparently as hopeless in Parker’s era as it is in ours. She sketched the “types” a single woman found herself dining with in terms that still seem apt. Of Ralph, a nice man of unfailing solicitousness: “I saw myself surrounded by a horde of wraps and sofa pillows … I saw myself a member of the Society Opposed to Woman Suffrage.” Of Maximilian, a leftist bohemian: “He capitalized the A in art.” Of Jim, a rising businessman: “In his affections I was rather third—first and second, Haig and Haig; and then, third, me.”

  Meanwhile “Interior Desecration,” published in the July 1917 issue of Vogue, sent Parker out in the world describing a bewildering visit to a home decorated by one (possibly fictitious) Alistair St. Cloud. (This visit was itself possibly fictional.) One room, we are told, is decorated in purple satin and black carpet, and contains “infrequent chairs, which must have been relics of the Inquisition.”

  There was no other thing in the room, save an ebony stand on which rested one lone book, bound in brilliant scarlet.

  I glanced at its title; it was The Decameron.

  “What room is this?” I asked.

  “This is the library,” said Alistair, proudly.

  She was getting better all the time, landing more punch lines, hitting her targets with greater precision. Her talent had been obvious from the start but her skill had needed the time to develop. It also needed, it seems, the stimulation of Crowninshield’s admiration and attention. In the first years of her career Parker was more productive than she’d ever be again. The discipline of earning her own way—which she did even after she married Edwin Pond Parker II in the spring of 1916—suited her.

  The man who gave Mrs. Parker his name was a young, blond Paine Webber stockbroker of good Connecticut stock, but like hers, the name implied more money than its holder possessed. Eddie, as he was known, was a person destined to come to us more through the lens of other peop
le’s impressions than his own telling. But we know that from the start he was a drinker, a bon vivant, far more than his future bride. When she met him, Dorothy was a near teetotaler. Over the course of their marriage Eddie would get her into gin.

  “From beginning to end, the process of getting married is a sad one for the groom,” Parker quipped in an article she wrote after her 1916 marriage. “He is lost in a fog of oblivion which envelops him from the first strains of the Wedding March to the beginning of the honeymoon.” And though she seemed by all accounts to love Eddie, she mostly left him to the fog. When America entered World War I a few months after their wedding, Eddie enlisted in an army company and went away to training and eventually the front. There, he apparently picked up a morphine addiction to pair with his alcoholism.

  Eddie Parker’s problems made him a spectral presence in his wife’s history, a ghost she dragged along to parties, someone she shoehorned into a story or two, without ever quite conveying what might have attracted her to him. Crowninshield was finally able to get Parker to Vanity Fair in 1918, and when he did it was her prose he wanted. P. G. Wodehouse had been the magazine’s drama critic from the time of its rebirth, but he’d quit. Crowninshield offered Parker his job. She had never written a word about the theater, yet the drama critic of Vanity Fair bore a considerable burden for the magazine. In the early half of the twentieth century, fashionable, important people cared about theater reviews. Moving pictures were not yet ascendant forms of popular entertainment; live theater still created and nurtured actual stars. There was a lot of money and status to be toyed with, influenced, and considered—not to mention insulted—on the drama critic’s beat.

  Perhaps that explains why Parker’s first reviews for the magazine were so tentative. The sure feet of the humor pieces suddenly lost their rhythm. She chatted nervously for the first few columns. In many of them, she spent little time describing the plays and musicals she was seeing at all. The very first, published in April 1918, devotes itself to a lengthy complaint about an audience member who spent most of the performance of a musical searching for a glove. It ends, abruptly: “So there you are.”

  Confidence came, but gradually. Long windups began to be more reliably punctuated by fastballs. Parker’s aim improved, too. By her fourth column she was complaining about the “dog’s life” of a theater critic who often found herself wanting to review shows that had closed by the time the magazine appeared on store shelves. By her fifth column she was casting aspersions on the theater’s love of the trappings of war: “How will they ever costume the show-girls if not in the flags of the Allies?” Her barbs gradually took on her old elegant touch: “I do wish that [Ibsen] had occasionally let the ladies take bichloride of mercury, or turn on the gas, or do something quiet and neat around the house,” she would complain of the inevitable gunshots in a production of Hedda Gabler.

  One source of her growing confidence was that at Vanity Fair Parker found herself writing for friends. Crowninshield understood her, as did the other editors at the magazine. Humor depends on a measure of shared understanding. Even when a joke is outrageous or transgressive, it can be that way only if there is some kind of consensus between joker and audience for its teller to transgress. And for most of Parker’s professional life, there was ready encouragement and approval from a circle of close friends and confidants. Almost all of them were men. Two Vanity Fair colleagues were particularly important. One was Robert Benchley, a maladroit newspaperman hired on as Vanity Fair’s managing editor shortly after Parker arrived from Vogue. The other was Robert Sherwood, a slimmer and quieter man whose reserve hid an equally devastating sense of humor. These three were an inseparable troublemaking trio at Vanity Fair.

  They wrote their own legend, in every sense of the phrase. “I must say,” Parker admitted much later with an obvious note of proud wickedness, “we behaved extremely badly.” They liked pranks, especially ones that needled their bosses. A favored anecdote saw Parker subscribe to a mortuary magazine. She and Benchley loved morbid humor. They also loved how much Crowninshield flinched when he passed Parker’s desk and saw the embalming diagram she’d ripped from one of the issues and pinned up. They took long lunches, were late and refused to make excuses for it, and when Crowninshield left for Europe on a business trip with Condé Nast they got worse. They were not dedicated employees.

  Their lazy ethos naturally extended to the Algonquin Round Table, that storied clique of writers and other assorted glamorous hangers-on who briefly gathered at the Algonquin Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. The Round Table formally began in self-indulgence, when Alexander Woollcott, then the drama critic for the New York Times, held a lunch to welcome himself back from war in 1919. Attendees enjoyed the occasion so much it was agreed they would continue. The group’s reputation long outlasted its actual existence, which was brief and ephemeral. The first references to the Round Table in gossip columns appear in 1922; by 1923 trouble is reported in the ranks, owing to anti-Semitic remarks by the hotel’s proprietor; and by 1925 the phenomenon was declared over.

  Parker later became ambivalent about the Round Table, the way she tended to become about virtually everything she’d done that had been a success. She was not, as is sometimes said, the only woman at the table; journalists like Ruth Hale and Jane Grant and novelists like Edna Ferber were often there sharing drinks with the rest. But Parker was undoubtedly the person whose manner and voice were most closely associated with it. Her reputation dwarfed those of most of the men who were there, most of whose names are forgotten now. And because her wit was so pithy, she was the one most frequently quoted by the gossip columnists.

  Uncomfortable with all of it, Parker would sometimes snap at interviewers who brought up the Round Table. “I wasn’t there very often,” she would say. “It cost too much.” Or she’d put the whole thing down: “Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them.” She was undoubtedly affected by the contemporary press, which was skeptical about, even critical of, the Round Table’s claims to literary might. “Not one [member] had given an impressive tone to literature nor had one fashioned a poem of consequence,” sniffed one gossip columnist in 1924. “Yet theirs was an attitude of superiority over conventional minds.”

  Parker was perhaps protesting too much, selling her friends a little short. Their laughter at the hotel lunches and dinners was obviously a light prize, carrying little consequence. But it was a kind of fuel for other, greater things. The sort of willing audience Benchley, Sherwood, and the rest of the group provided was energizing for her. Never again would she write as much as she did during the Vanity Fair and Algonquin years.

  Parker’s congenital inability to accept people’s self-images—as serious writers, as glamorous stars—haunted her as a critic. She was not a theatergoer who was easily satisfied; she was, in short, not a fan. Producers grew angry about the wounding remarks that appeared in Parker’s columns. The offense caused was always disproportionate to the insult, but that rarely mattered. The producers were advertisers as well as critical subjects. They could wield a club.

  Sometimes Parker managed to anger them without even trying. The column that broke Condé Nast’s back was sadly not even one of Parker’s best. The show under review was a now-forgotten Somerset Maugham comedy called Caesar’s Wife. Its star was one Billie Burke, of whom Parker remarked:

  Miss Burke, in the role of the young wife, looking charmingly youthful. She is at her best in her more serious moments; in her desire to convey the girlishness of the character, she plays her lighter scenes rather as if she were giving an impersonation of Eva Tanguay.

  This was a subtler cut than usual. Yet it sent Flo Ziegfeld, the legendary Broadway producer and Burke’s husband, flying to his telephone with complaints. Eva Tanguay, for one thing, was an “exotic dancer,” or the 1920 equivalent. Billie Burke, meanwhile, had a squeaky-clean image. She is probably now best known for her role as Glinda the Good Witch in the 1939 MGM version of The Wi
zard of Oz. But the squalid implications may not have been what most offended Burke. She had just turned thirty-five when this review was published, and more than likely resented Parker’s jabs at her age much more than any implication of stripperhood.

  In any event, Ziegfeld was only the latest to complain about Parker’s critical liberties, so Condé Nast insisted on a change. Crowninshield took Parker to tea at the Plaza and told her he wanted to take her off the theater beat. There is some quarrel over whether she resigned or was fired from the magazine entirely, the pendulum swinging back and forth depending on who you’re reading. She said she ordered the most expensive dessert on the menu, stormed out, and called Benchley. He immediately resolved to quit as well.

  Benchley had become the most important person, bar none, in Parker’s life. It was his approval she wanted and his voice she emulated. Their friends wondered if they were having an affair but there seems to be no evidence of that. She was plainly just as important to him as he was to her, since he gave up that job while he had children to support. “It was the greatest act of friendship I’d known,” Parker said.

  They were less angry about leaving the magazine than their dramatic exit suggested. They chose their own successors. Parker had pulled a very young critic named Edmund Wilson from the slush pile not too long before she left. When Crowninshield tapped Wilson to take over managing editor duties as Benchley’s replacement, she may have even been pleased. Her work would be back in Vanity Fair’s pages within a year of her being fired.

  The handoff was smooth, punctuated with drinks at the Algonquin for the young and uninitiated Wilson, who was years from becoming the revered and “serious” critic of Axel’s Castle and To the Finland Station. Though invited to Round Table gatherings, “I did not find them particularly interesting,” Wilson wrote in his diaries. But he did find Parker intriguing, because of “the conflicts in her nature.” He distinguished her from the other Algonquinites because she could talk to serious people “on an equal basis.” Her “well-aimed and deadly malice” made her less provincial than the rest of the group. All this suited Wilson, who’d keep up their friendship for the rest of Parker’s life, even when she was washed-up and penniless. Wilson, unlike many men of his background and circumstances, really liked the company of sharp women. He couldn’t seem to resist the company of the truly clever.