by Marion Meade
Frank Adams also drank too much, but it was the early stages of an Alzheimer’s-type disorder that caused his deterioration. In the late 1930s, the rhyming wit of the World became the host of a popular radio panel show, Information Please. When it made the transition to television, he was slipping mentally and had to be replaced after two performances because of complaints that he looked like a death’s-head. After Esther divorced him, which he never was able to admit, he lived at the Players Club, where it saddened fellow guests to witness his senile rambling and his intoxication. His son Timothy thought that “he aged quite prematurely. In his early sixties he looked like an old man and by the time he died at seventy-eight, he was ancient.” During F.P.A.’s final years in a nursing home, where he watched television and read paperback novels, he would have been destitute had not Harold Ross and William Shawn kept him on The New Yorker payroll at a modest stipend.
Those Round Tablers not afflicted by alcoholism had other crippling problems that made happiness difficult to sustain. Few of them managed to find satisfaction in love or marriage. Marc Connelly, after years of frustration over his unrequited passion for Margalo Gillmore, finally married a Mack Sennett bathing beauty, Madeline Hurlock, only to watch her fall in love with one of his best friends, Robert Sherwood, who himself had been trapped in a turbulent sadomasochistic marriage with Mary Brandon. George and Beatrice Kaufman, unable to have sex with each other, adopted a daughter and then went their separate ways emotionally, and a similar type of open-marriage arrangement was chosen by Neysa McMein and John Baragwanath. In 1928, Jane Grant divorced Harold Ross, who went on to marry twice again. The Round Tablers greeted Heywood Broun and Ruth Hale’s divorce with equanimity, but they could accept neither his remarriage to a dancer nor his conversion to Catholicism for her sake. Robert Benchley’s farcical marriage and his endless womanizing contrasted so vividly with his basic integrity and decency that practically everyone who knew him colluded in pretending that it was not happening. No doubt the worst hypocrite in this situation was Benchley himself, who continued to masquerade as an all-American, suburban family man until the end of his life. In the thirties, he had been a favorite lover of Tallulah Bankhead. Brendan Gill recalled that “she was always praising the size of his prick and telling everybody what a terrific ‘cocksman’ he was. An ordinary mortal, which Benchley was not, might have thought, ‘Yea! spread the word,’ but he simply couldn’t stand to hear it.” Edna Ferber and Aleck Woollcott sidestepped messy sexual complications by choosing celibacy.
The collective excesses of the Round Tablers made Dorothy’s problems appear unexceptional.
In 1943, Dorothy gave up her trips to Florida. Once Alan’s squadron had been transferred to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and then to Long Island, she saw practically nothing of him. When he did get a furlough, she was intent on making it perfect, which is to say, she usually managed to spoil it. As she admitted in “The Lovely Leave,” a short story she published in the Woman’s Home Companion, their meetings always ended in disaster. All it took was a single bitchy word from either to start a shoot-out, then they both turned glacial, and before she knew it, the door would be slamming behind him. “When she knew he was gone, she was cool and still no longer. She ran about the little flat, striking her breast and sobbing. Then she had two months to ponder what had happened, to see how she had wrought the ugly small ruin. She cried in the nights.”
She also cursed him in the nights. Once she sent a letter that seemed to be nothing but a half-dozen unrelated items of gossip about people they knew. At the end she added a postscript, suggesting he look at the first letter of each sentence to decipher her real message. The letters spelled out FUCK YOU.
She seldom visited the farm. Wolfinger’s general store in Ottsville could generally count on unloading certain brands of toilet paper merely by mentioning it was used by Mrs. Parker, but now the toilet paper had to sell on its own merits. She moved to the New Weston, a residence hotel on the corner of Madison Avenue and Fiftieth Street, where she had a pleasant two-room apartment. She made it homier by bringing from the country a few pieces of furniture and one or two precious possessions—a Utrillo landscape and a cocktail shaker engraved with the words TO ROBERT BENCHLEY FROM HIS SUNDAY SCHOOL CLASS.
Meanwhile, she was not the only one of her crowd to be alone. Lillian Hellman was in pretty much the same situation after Dashiell Hammett enlisted and was shipped to the Aleutian Islands. Hellman had adjusted to his absence. She was occupied with the film version of Watch on the Rhine and thinking of beginning a new play. Dorothy gave the appearance of being occupied. She worked for the Spanish Refugee Appeal, now part of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, and she made speeches on behalf of causes as diverse as Yugoslav relief, the rescue of European Jews, and children’s book week. When she volunteered to sell war bonds, the Treasury Department teamed her up with Ogden Nash and a young New Yorker editor just returned from New Guinea and sent them on a tour of Pennsylvania to visit schools. To E. J. Kahn, Jr., who had joined the magazine in 1937, Dorothy was a figure from another era. “At the New Yorker she was considered a great lady,” but in his twenty-seven-year-old eyes she appeared “small and faded, too world-weary to be witty.”
While Benchley was still alive, she made several trips to Hollywood. She would tell people that she was doing a picture with Gregory Ratoff, or she might name other producers. If it was true, there remains no record of such employment, no screen credits. She stayed at the Garden of Allah. In Benchley’s bungalow, the bar never closed.
Dorothy insisted that Helen come out and visit. Due to wartime travel restrictions, it was an exhausting train trip that meant sitting up for several nights. Dorothy took her sister to see the standard sights. They went to Romanoff’s and to the set of a Joan Crawford picture, and she introduced Helen to Marlene Dietrich and George Murphy. All the time Dorothy kept putting down the movie stars. “Everyone makes a swell fuss over Dot,” Helen wrote to her son Bill. “I can’t understand why she hates it so.” Although Dorothy outdid herself to show Helen a good time, Helen had difficulty with the pace and found it a relief to go home. “I seemed to be continually drinking. I really stood it beautifully, too. I was surprised at myself.”
In the fall of 1943, Dorothy returned to New York because Alan was due to be sent overseas, and she wanted to say good-bye. It was unbearable for her to admit that his life offered her no place. She felt deeply wounded that he was so obviously relieved to be free of her and suffered from intense, almost paranoid jealousy. His friends, the air corps, and the entire army of the United States disgusted her. It seemed as if he had gained a whole new life, but, “I have half an old one,” she wrote, feeling deprived. The thought of Alan having any kind of existence separate from hers made her furious, and knowing that it was she who had forced him to enlist made it even worse.
After he left in November, she rushed back to the Garden of Allah to spend the Christmas holidays with her Hollywood friends, but she was in a smoldering mood. At nine o’clock on Christmas morning she knocked on the door of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, wanting company. This was extraordinarily early for her to be up, and since she looked queasy, it was likely she had never been to bed. She told them that Alan’s checkbook stubs had revealed spending fifteen thousand dollars on a bracelet for Miriam Hopkins. Since this information failed to jibe with her portrayal of him as a dedicated pederast, the Hacketts were understandably perplexed.
In the evening, she turned up with two photographs of Alan in uniform and asked the Hacketts which one they preferred. When they reluctantly made a choice, she presented them with both photos, frames and all.
Helen suffered a minor stroke that left her with diminished sensation in her hands, and then developed pneumonia. On January 18, 1944, she died at the age of fifty-seven. Bill Droste wired Dorothy of his mother’s death. She wired back immediately, saying that she would be unable to get back East in time for the funeral, but wished to pay for the burial expenses. She aske
d Bill to order a blanket of roses to cover the coffin. He replied that, while Helen had expressly forbidden flowers, they would gladly accept her offer to pay for the funeral.
Dorothy was stunned. Her customary manner of dealing with death was to wire Toni Strassman at The Viking Press and direct her to order cut flowers to be charged to her royalty account. Her offer of flowers having been rejected, she did not know what to do. The Drostes heard nothing more from her.
“We guessed she was annoyed with us,” said Marge Droste. “We didn’t get the blanket of roses, and she never paid for the funeral.”
Three months after Helen’s death, Bert Rothschild died suddenly. Since Dorothy had not been as close to him and Mate, it was easier to bear. As for her eldest brother, nobody had heard from poor Harry in thirty-five years. She had stopped speculating long ago on whether he was dead or alive. Helen’s passing threw her off balance.
William Targ, an editor with World Publishing in Cleveland, was not only an admirer of Dorothy’s but an exceptionally personable man. For more than a year, he pursued her with a proposal that she edit an anthology of women writers. He was confident she could do it because the volume would require a minimum of writing, only brief critical introductions to the writers. He finally enticed her into accepting.
Whenever Targ came to New York, he called Dorothy to inquire about her progress, and they would meet for dinner at the New Weston. Claiming to be working hard, she pointed to a sheet of paper in her typewriter.
“You see that?” she said with a reassuring smile. “That’s a page of your book.” It was a lie, but not one that he cared to challenge, any more than he objected when she broke appointments with telegrams full of absurd excuses. She had German measles, or she had to fly to Amsterdam.
One rainy evening, she and her poodle Misty paid a call on Targ at the Warwick Hotel. As usual, she chain-smoked her Chesterfields, played with her dinner, and showed an unquenchable thirst for martinis. When it was time to leave, she was tremendously plastered. Targ wanted to take her home in a cab, but she refused. At the curb, as they began to argue, she donned her aristocratic manners. Targ pointed out that she had no coat or umbrella and it was pouring rain. Dragging the sleepy Misty behind her, she disappeared into the storm and left Targ standing there soaking wet.
Facing reality, Targ decided that “she wasn’t capable of doing any work that she cared to see in print.” That was a tactful way to describe it.
Dorothy felt as if she were being gnawed by “a great, grey rat,” a rat whose name was Captain Alan Campbell. In London with Air Force Intelligence, Alan had yet to come within sniffing distance of a battlefield. Judging by the exhilarated tone of his letters, Dorothy concluded that he was having a lovely time. It seemed wrong somehow to be enjoying a war so much.
Toward the spring of 1944, she first began to worry about small, cryptic hints in his references to dinner party invitations and weekends spent whizzing about the English countryside to palatial homes. At first she ignored the hints, but they became impossible to disregard. Every now and then names were mentioned; she began to wonder if Alan might be sleeping with someone. She had not expected him to remain celibate all this time. Men would be men, she supposed, and “when were soldiers true?” She wrote a poem, her last, gingerly giving him permission to sleep with anybody he liked and emphasizing that he should not feel guilty about it either. She simply had one request:
Only, for the nights that were,
Soldier, and the dawns that came,
When in sleep you turn to her
Call her by my name.
After VE Day, Alan was stationed in Paris for a time, but he returned to London. He wrote Dorothy that he had fallen in love with another woman, a titled and wealthy aristocrat. This was supposed to be a secret because the woman was married and had three children. According to Alan she was passionately in love with him.
Dorothy was completely taken by surprise. Her immediate reaction was to panic, drink, and slide into a black hole of gloom. She consulted a psychiatrist for a time, but it failed to help, probably because she regarded therapists as quacks. In this crisis, Toni Strassman, Harold Guinzburg’s former secretary who had become a literary agent, often held her hand. A kindhearted woman with no family responsibilities of her own, Strassman lived nearby and was willing to slip over to the New Weston to keep her company for whole evenings. Since Strassman knew Alan, she was a logical confidante to whom Dorothy could unburden her feelings about the Englishwoman, whose existence she wanted to conceal from her friends. Dorothy assured Strassman that she was having a nervous breakdown: She related anecdotes about her psychiatrist, alluded to powerful medications, and claimed to be receiving electroshock treatments. Since she looked half-dead, Strassman assumed she was telling the truth.
Only after Dorothy’s fury against Alan began to flow did her depression slowly depart. She had two and a half years to come to terms with his bombshell, because he took his time returning after the war. Although he told her he planned to divorce and remarry, some of his friends wondered if he seriously meant it. They knew that he and his woman friend were fond of each other, got on extremely well, and shared a number of tastes, including an interest in furniture and decoration, but they doubted that the affair would result in marriage. Josh Logan interpreted it as a threat to remind Dorothy how much she needed him. “Alan expected her to plead with him to come home.” Before the war, he had a great need to punish her, and his English romance was a ready-made way to achieve this end.
For a time, Dorothy’s biggest fear was that the Englishwoman would want to marry Alan. When she decided she never wanted to see him again, she feared that the woman would not. That Alan might fall in love with another woman had not seriously occurred to her. Marriage to him had entailed a number of indignities, including the sly smiles of those who had ridiculed her for marrying a chorus boy. She had been responsible for placing him in a false light and telling people he was gay. She had built the myth of his homosexuality so carefully that she herself had nearly come to believe it. Even in the late fifties, she blithely remarked to Charles Addams, “I can compete with the girls, but not the boys.” The Englishwoman was no boy.
By the fall of 1946, for reasons never clear to her, Alan’s affair seemed to be wearing thin; suddenly he wrote that he was coming home. Dorothy did not answer. In desperation, he contacted Toni Strassman, asking her to act as intermediary, to reassure Dottie that he would be back soon. Dorothy’s pride would not permit her to forgive him or to take him back. She decided it was time he earned his own living. She intended to divorce him.
Alan returned to New York on November 13. The following spring, he was in Las Vegas. In this rite of passage, both he and Dorothy charged mental cruelty. Despite his residence in Nevada, Alan insisted that he did not want a divorce, which no doubt was the truth. It was the war that had made them strangers and destroyed their marriage, he believed. “I’m sorry it’s over,” he told newspaper reporters. “We had a wonderful time.” He assured his family that Dottie was still the love of his life. To his uncle he said: “I can’t live without her and I can’t live with her. Now what am I going to do about it, Roy?” Roy Eichel, a bachelor, could offer no advice.
The farm was put up for sale. Furnishings were divided, although there was little Dorothy wished to keep except the Utrillo and a Picasso gouache. The rest was either stored at Horte’s house in Point Pleasant or moved into the city to furnish Alan’s new duplex on East Sixty-second Street. Some of his decorating could not be removed—for example, the blueprint wallpaper in the upstairs hallway, labeled “A Country Residence for Mr. and Mrs. Alan Campbell,” which finally began to buckle in the 1980s and had to be removed by the farm’s present owner. The mirrors lining the dining room windows remained and the statue of Bacchus continued to stand sentinel in the garden.
Both Dorothy and Alan handled the divorce quite well. Throughout the unpleasant task of dismantling their marriage, they maintained cordial relations. Doro
thy finally stopped referring to Alan as “a shit and a queer.” Although they seldom saw each other, the Christmas after the divorce they spent a rare evening together at the theater and went to the Stork Club afterward. The name of the play was appropriate: Crime and Punishment.
Chapter 16
TOAD TIME
1948-1955
Tall with dark eyes and hair, Rosser Lynn Evans was thirty-one years old. Alan had been responsible for introducing him to Dorothy in Miami Beach, where Evans had been in Officer Candidate School with Alan and Josh Logan. In 1942, she had paid Evans no attention, except to notice that he was a two-fisted drinker who always seemed to be drunker than she was. According to Logan, Evans not only seemed to be drunker, he was. “He was a confirmed alcoholic who would just go silly with liquor. Once we got him through a mapmaking examination by cheating for him. It was an awful thing to do to the United States Air Force but he was a nice guy and we liked him.”
After the war, Evans was working in New York as a radio announcer when Dorothy encountered him at a party. His confession that he aspired to writing a novel caught her interest. She told him that she hoped to write an historical play about Mary and Charles Lamb but hadn’t yet found a collaborator. Was he interested? This was her all-purpose cocktail party conversational gambit, but it was fresh to Evans. Unable to distinguish Lambs from lamb chops, he tried to hide his ignorance. Later he described himself as “dazed. Me collaborate? I’d have been glad just to sharpen her pencils.”
