Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  A westerner from Colorado, a miner’s son who had dropped out of school at fourteen, Ross had bummed around the country working on a dozen newspapers before he enlisted. He had planned to return to the West Coast, charter a boat, and, like Jack London, take a restorative cruise to the South Seas, a project at once exotic and worthy of a real man. Definitely not among his plans was living in New York, which he considered a terrible place. While in Paris, Woollcott had introduced him to Jane Grant, a New York Times society reporter who had come over with the YMCA, and Ross had fallen in love. Now he lived in the Village and edited a new weekly magazine, The Home Sector, which was a stateside version of Stars and Stripes for veterans, and Jane Grant was back at the Times with a promotion to hotel news editor. They were engaged.

  Another couple at Woollcott’s luncheon had already married and spent their honeymoon in France as war correspondents: Heywood Broun and Ruth Hale. Dorothy had met Broun one summer long ago at the shore. He was a distant memory of heat and sand, a Horace Mann student who was an acquaintance of her sister. She was pleased to see Broun and liked his wife, supposing them to be a modern couple successfully negotiating the shoals of marriage by having produced a child and still pursuing their separate interests.

  Frank Adams, best man at their wedding, had called them “the clinging oak and the sturdy vine,” for Ruth was a militant feminist who had balked at the word obey in the Episcopal marriage service and threatened to call the wedding off. Tight-lipped when anyone addressed her as Mrs. Broun, she declared that she was not and never would be anyone but Ruth Hale. Her husband, a thirty-one-year-old Tribune columnist, was a large, anxious, slovenly man, who bore a physical resemblance to a laundry bag. His sense of fashion was certainly odd. In Paris, learning of General John Pershing’s decree that all war correspondents must wear uniforms, Broun outfitted himself at the Galeries Lafayette department store in what he believed to be appropriate attire: pink riding breeches, fedora, and raccoon coat. Pershing, noticing him at an inspection, disheveled and unlaundered with his puttees sagging about his ankles, stared in bewilderment before asking, “What happened? Did you fall down?” How Broun managed to survive a war is unclear. His phobias included trains, automobiles, and elevators. He was also a hypochondriac who took his own pulse to make sure he was still alive.

  At the Algonquin, Dorothy remained silent, shyly blinking at everyone from under the brim of her Merry Widow hat, virginal, self-conscious, and extremely well turned out in one of her good suits so that she looked like a Park Avenue princess slumming. She could not decide whether or not she even liked Woollcott and his friends. A few months earlier she had written a scathing article about men whose war service had taken place far behind the front lines, scorning them as “the numerous heroes who nobly accepted commissions in those branches of the service where the fountain pen is mightier than the sword.” Finding herself in the company of “fountain-pen lancers” made her feel so uncomfortable that she usually clammed up and concealed “the fact that my husband went to the front—it made him seem like such a slacker.” Nobody at Woollcott’s party knew the article was hers because she had used a pseudonym, but nevertheless she felt biased against them.

  In years to come efforts were made to resurrect what, if anything, of significance had taken place that day, who had said what and to whom, but by then nobody remembered much. The only certainty was that Aleck Woollcott had held center stage recounting his wartime adventures at length and that the others were good-natured about allowing him to spout off. All his stories began with “When I was in the theater of war...” and finally Arthur Samuels cut him short. “Aleck, if you ever were in the theater of war, it was in the last-row seat nearest the exit.” Despite the presence of three professional women, the climate of the luncheon was very much that of an old boys’ get-together where talk of war or money would have been inevitable in any case. For Woollcott and the other veterans, it had been the best of all possible wars, but now they were concerned about their futures. In the summer of 1919, a time of great expectations and endless possibilities, they all wanted to retrieve careers, make contacts, get their books published and plays produced, be rich and famous, rise like cream to the top of the New York bottle. Therefore, they had come prepared to listen to Woollcott’s bragging and laugh at everybody’s jokes, just as if they were at a Booster Club bash in Toledo. Besides, it was an ideal way to spend a June day when the weather was fine and nobody felt much like working in the first place.

  “Why don’t we do this every day?” somebody said as the luncheon began to break up. Since it sounded like a good idea, a polite murmur of approval was heard.

  Walking back to the office with Sherwood and Benchley, Dorothy did not seriously expect they would do it every day. For that matter, there seemed to be no good reason to do it ever again.

  Shortly after Eddie’s return in August 1919, Robert Sherwood photographed the Parkers seated side by side on a park bench. Eddie is wearing a civilian suit and a lopsided smile. Dorothy looks haggard with her mouth set in a grim line. Their bodies are not touching.

  The war had taken visible toll of her husband. His features had roughened, become puffy; the sweet, angular boyishness was missing and so was the playful energy she had found so appealing. Anxious to see his family (his sister had died in childbirth while he was overseas), he had gone to Hartford for a while. When he returned to New York, he was in no great hurry to resume his career. Although he seemed glad to be home, he also appeared subdued, indifferent, restless.

  Since the fall theater season was just getting under way, there were many evenings when Dorothy had to work. She came home only long enough to change into dress clothes before going downtown again. She expected Eddie to accompany her. Sometimes he did, if the show happened to be a musical. Serious plays bored him. On Sundays they visited the Drostes, where he enjoyed playing with Helen’s children.

  At first, when Dorothy came home from the office weary and eager to pour out her headaches, Eddie was quick to commiserate. She felt able to relax, even cry if she felt like it. Before long he greeted a long face with impatience, wondering why she was bawling again when there never was anything the matter. She explained that she enjoyed crying just for the sake of it, but this made no sense to him. If she was crying, he would slam out, returning hours later when they would make up in bed.

  In time, his addiction to morphine could no longer be concealed. When he finally agreed to seek treatment, it turned out to be a more complicated process than she had expected. It meant, she recalled, probably exaggerating, “one sanatorium after another.” Although she managed as well as she could, her husband was a tortured man and living with him could be harrowing. It was rumored that on more than one occasion she returned home from Vanity Fair to find him stretched out on several chairs with his head in the oven of their gas stove.

  The return of Nast and Crowninshield at the end of August put a noticeable crimp in the high spirits of the cub lions. To show their affection, they festooned Crownie’s office with streamers of crepe paper and hung a welcome-home sign. He was not pleased.

  The next morning Dorothy arrived late, but Benchley breezed in even later because Gertrude had gone into labor and he had taken her to the hospital. After lunch, he failed to return to the office. Again the next day no work got done because Dorothy and Sherry were busy offering congratulations on the birth of Robert Charles Benchley, Jr., and listening to Benchley’s stories of his experiences at the hospital. Dorothy, possessive about him, did not like to be reminded that he had a second life in which she had no part. Not that she had any desire to be Gertrude Benchley, who was stuck in Crestwood with a little boy and a new baby while her husband was away all day in the city enjoying himself with women like herself. This was exactly the sort of marriage that had always terrified Dorothy. Curiously, her indignation was aroused not at the thought of Gertrude’s entrapment, but at the thought of Mr. Benchley’s, a perception of his marriage that he did nothing to discourage. What she
couldn’t bring herself to wonder was why he had chosen it. Instead, she preferred seeing him as a helpless victim, either of circumstance or of Gertrude, most likely the latter. Although she had yet to meet Mrs. Benchley, she already had formed a picture of her as a frumpish, housecoated female who smelled of germicidal soap, looked for buttons to sew before they fell off, and slept in curlers.

  That fall was a time of growing tension, as Dorothy tried to please one man at home and other men at the office. However hard she tried, she could not seem to succeed in either place. She failed to understand why Crowninshield fussed about copy deadlines since she worked harder and longer than he had any right to expect. If she was sometimes tardy, it was for good reason because she spent many evenings at the theater. Aside from her drama column, she did additional theater pieces as “Helen Wells,” contributed verse, composed captions for Fish’s drawings, read manuscripts, and helped with editing and proofreading. In her opinion, the Nast organization not only should have felt more appreciative, it also owed her a raise. When she asked for one, Crowninshield promised that he would speak to Nast after the first of the year.

  The other cub lions felt equally dissatisfied. In unguarded moments, they grumbled about their wages so loudly that eventually somebody in the office reported their complaints to Condé Nast. Immediately a memo was circulated warning that discussion of salaries was against company policy and cause for discharge. No sooner had the memo reached their desks than the three of them retaliated with a memo of their own. They resented “being told what we may and what we may not discuss,” and they also protested against “the spirit of petty regulation” that had made possible such an edict in the first place. Then they lettered placards spelling out their salaries and took perverse pleasure in strolling through the office with the provocative signs swinging around their necks.

  A flabbergasted Nast responded to their home-grown union by doing nothing. However, Crowninshield became seriously alarmed and entreated them not to exhaust the publisher’s patience.

  Still boiling, but trying to keep a low profile around the office, they allowed themselves to blow out steam over lunch. From time to time, they ate at the nearby Algonquin, whose name they had familiarly shortened to “the Gonk.” After his party in the summer, Aleck Woollcott had continued to lunch there and nearly always invited friends to join him. Many of those who had attended his lunch had been dropped because he found them boring. Whenever the Vanity Fair editors came by, they were welcomed, as were two newspaper reporters, Marc Connelly and George Kaufman, who had not been present at the June gathering. Connelly, who wrote theater news for the Morning Telegraph, was a cheerful, bald man of twenty-nine and had the manner of a talkative leprechaun. Born across the river from Pittsburgh in McKeesport, he had been living in New York for three years, since his ambition was to become a playwright. Nightly, after his paper went to press, he strolled uptown with George Kaufman to discuss ideas they might transform into salable plays.

  Kaufman, Woollcott’s assistant and a Times drama reporter, was a shy, nervous man who also came from Pittsburgh. He was a year older than Connelly, but aside from an interest in the theater, no two men could have been less similar. Kaufman’s demeanor breathed gloom: narrow face, glasses, a high pompadour of dark hair, and a long skinny body about which he felt so self-conscious that he refused to be seen in a bathing suit. His phobias were disabling, his hypochondria of textbook dimensions. He had a horror of being touched and after a single year of marriage was unable to have sex with his wife, Beatrice, although apparently he experienced fewer problems with prostitutes.

  Before long, Woollcott was coming to the Algonquin regularly, and manager Frank Case began automatically reserving a table for him. Since the hotel was patronized by celebrities such as Mary Pickford and Booth Tarkington, it was understandable that Case would not be impressed by the Woollcott contingent. To him they were “just a crowd of unusually agreeable folk.” Plainly, “none of them had any money,” which no doubt was the reason he directed the waiter to leave complimentary popovers and celery and olives on their table. The group took on a mangy aura on those days when they were joined by Heywood Broun, who usually looked like a one-man slum. Once, outside the hotel, a sympathetic passerby handed him a dime.

  Case was astute in his judgment about their financial status. The Vanity Fair editors filled up on popovers and ordered eggs, the cheapest entrée on the menu. They reserved their energy for vilifying Nast, whose bookkeeper mentality they found disgusting. As they all were aware, Nast’s obsession in life was sex, a commodity he pursued with greed and aggression. It evidently mattered little to him if the woman was call girl, manicurist, or socialite. They suspected that he was using Frank Crowninshield to sponsor his entry into New York high society, and still worse, using his connections to find women. Benchley’s horror of libertines and social climbers made him label Nast’s organization as the ultimate “whited sepulchre.” Sherwood was quick to point out that employees were “treated like serfs” and “paid that way, too,” but that Crownie was not to blame because he himself was handled like a poor relation.

  To take their minds off Condé Nast, they began to talk about writing a play together, perhaps a musical. Searching for a story, they came up with the idea of a man who is bored with his witty, glamorous wife and who chooses instead to have an extramarital frolic with the least splashy woman imaginable, a mouse who wants to breed and keep house, the two types of women corresponding exactly to Dorothy and Gertrude Benchley. Having found a twist, they began trying to develop an outline. “All we have to do is write it,” Benchley recorded optimistically in his diary, next to a reminder that he was four hundred dollars in debt.

  The day before Christmas, Crowninshield summoned Dorothy into his office for a private talk. He made clear to her that she should not expect a raise, for he was displeased with the quality of the magazine in general and her work in particular. Unemotional, officious, his meticulously pressed gray suit matching his silvering hair, Crownie’s usual gentle manner drained away in niggling complaints. Even though she assumed that he was voicing Nast’s objections, she felt thoroughly upset. She did not understand how her mentor, the man who had admired her outspokenness, could now be denigrating what he once had endorsed and promoted.

  “Vanity Fair was a magazine of no opinion,” she later said, “but I had opinions.” She always remembered that day with great bitterness.

  Chapter 5

  THE ALGONQUIN ROUND TABLE

  1920-1921

  On the second Sunday in January 1920, Crownie invited her to tea at the Plaza Hotel. Since it was a cold, snowy day, he asked the headwaiter to brighten up the table with roses. First, he told her that he admired her extravagantly and always would and that he would be honored to publish anything she might care to write. He was sure that she would be famous some day. Then he announced that Plum Wodehouse was returning to Vanity Fair, so that her services were no longer required, unfortunately.

  Dorothy, meanwhile, had remained silent. She was waiting for him to bring up the names of Florenz Ziegfeld, David Belasco, and Charles Dillingham, three powerful producers who had recently trotted onto Broadway stages a flock of turkeys, to which Dorothy had speedily applied euthanasia. All three men, coincidentally advertisers in the magazine, had subsequently complained to Condé Nast. But Crownie was letting that matter pass. He was silent too about the angry phone call he had received from Billie Burke, the actress wife of Flo Ziegfeld who recently had appeared in Somerset Maugham’s comedy Caesar’s Wife. Dorothy’s review of the show had noted that Burke coyly threw herself around the stage as if giving an impersonation of exotic dancer Eva Tanguay. Burke had taken umbrage at that comment and very likely her husband had encouraged her to make a fuss. Crownie had wound up apologizing to Billie Burke.

  Crowninshield’s gallantry in awkward situations was well known. His gentlemanly enthusiasm for discretion took precedence over truthfulness, and as a result, the real reason for Dorothy’s dis
missal was left unstated. He then suggested that if she wanted to work on “little pieces at home,” they could work out a satisfactory rate.

  Though Dorothy was livid, she did not press for further explanations. The only thing left for her to do was to reject his proposal and order the most costly dessert on the menu.

  After leaving the Plaza, she steamed home to telephone Benchley, who came into the city on the next train. Dorothy, Eddie, and Benchley hashed over and over the events of recent weeks until late into the night. Robert Sherwood had been fired after being told that the woman who gave music lessons to Nast’s daughter would be taking over his duties. Dorothy’s dismissal seemed genuinely unfair and undeserved because she had praised many productions and many individual performers, including Billie Burke. The upshot of their discussion was that Benchley decided to quit and wrote his letter of resignation when he arrived at the office the next morning. He labeled the magazine’s action in Dorothy’s case as “incredibly stupid and insincere,” but apart from that, he added, his job wasn’t attractive enough to keep him there without Dorothy Parker and Robert Sherwood.

  His resignation stunned Crowninshield. In his opinion, writers came a dime a dozen but a decent managing editor, which he considered Benchley, was hard to find. When he understood that Benchley was serious, he agreed to accept the resignation and predicted he would become famous some day, one of the treacly severance speeches so typical of the man. Later, Edmund Wilson overheard him remark that it was a pity Benchley had overreacted and that the way he had carried on about Mrs. Parker had been absurd.

  Dorothy was deeply moved by Benchley’s allegiance, which she would call “the greatest act of friendship I’d known,” and unquestionably it was a generous action for a man with a wife and two children to support. There was something fiercely loyal in Benchley’s temperament, something beyond normal devotedness. This was not the first time he had left a job because a colleague was being mistreated. Benchley edited a Sunday rotogravure section for the Tribune in 1918. The paper’s managing editor was his friend and Harvard classmate Ernest Gruening, whom the Tribune suspected of being pro-German, perhaps because of his name or his pacifist leanings—a pacifism Benchley shared. When Gruening was fired without a chance to clear himself, Benchley resigned the same day. Whether or not Dorothy knew of this incident, she still would have regarded his resignation from Vanity Fair as a sign of special fidelity.