Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  Arriving at the Plaza Hotel with her belongings stuffed into two large straw bags, she was dressed in a dirndl skirt and a scruffy peasant blouse and looked like a migrant lettuce picker. Her request for a suite ignored the fact that such accommodations cost fifty-five dollars a day and she was carrying barely enough cash on her person to pay the taxi driver. Desperate to get her bearings, she could think of no more ideal surroundings in which to burn Ross Evans in effigy than the most expensive hotel in New York. Soon, she got hold of herself and began telephoning to gather together her friends, the tone of her voice promising electrifying stories of adventures south of the border.

  When Bea Stewart arrived, Dorothy gave her a tour of the suite before putting on a woebegone face and launching into a recital of her afflictions: Li’l Abner was a totally inept writer who had never published a story; she had got him a byline in Cosmopolitan; his closest contact with movies had been Radio City Music Hall; she had got him a Hollywood screen credit, VIP treatment in Dallas, and his name in Time magazine. She had even given him the portrait of Scott Fitzgerald she had purchased from Zelda in 1934. She had not expected gratitude. On the other hand, she did not expect him to desert her for another woman, throw her out of her house, force her to flee the country, and—if all that were not horrible enough—he had stolen her dog too. From now on, she vowed, she planned to live by herself.

  Three months later, she married Alan again in a splendid ceremony in Bel Air, California, after waking on the morning of August 17, 1950, pulling the blanket over her face, and warning him not to look at the bride. It was bad luck.

  She behaved as if the surprise reconciliation had been foreordained and regarded it as a second chance. “Who in life gets a second chance?” she asked. Eager to have fun again, perhaps to be spoiled by a nice-looking man, she was willing to forget ten years riddled by conflict. Alan, oddly enough, was the one who felt uncertain about remarriage. He queried friends, “Do you think she needs me?” A woman he had been dating expressed herself bluntly and asked him, “How can you marry that old woman?” The question was beside the point; at forty-six, Alan had long ceased to consider the age difference. Announcing the news to the press, he said that he had asked Dottie to remarry him, because this was how it was done where he came from, and she had said yes. “You never know why one does these things,” he added lamely. They had no plans for a honeymoon because, Dorothy said, “we’ve been everywhere.”

  Alan took charge of the wedding arrangements. He leased and hastily furnished a big house, booked a judge, and ordered a bridal bouquet. Charlie Brackett served as best man and Dorothy, in a nonethnic taffeta cocktail dress, was attended by Sally Foster and Miriam Hopkins. The reception at the Brackett home was memorable for lavish food and drink and the diversity of the guests, who included Humphrey Bogart, Howard and Lucinda Dietz, and James Agee. When somebody pointed out that a few of the guests had not spoken to each other for years, Dorothy agreed that was true. “Including the bride and groom,” she murmured. Budd Schulberg described the party as “a real Hollywood wedding. Dottie had a little bouquet of violets and was busy playing the bride. She went around saying, ‘What are you going to do when you love the son of a bitch?’ She was a riot and yet nobody could doubt she was absolutely serious.” Alan was heard to remark brightly that “now we can have dinner parties again.” As the evening wore on, reported Howard Dietz, “parlor games erupted and raged for hours. All the guests who could still walk played, until Dottie got mad at Alan for guessing she was the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus when she was acting out the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  For Alan, the three years since the divorce had often been a struggle, but he was not a person who permitted himself to suffer visibly. For a time he had shared his Manhattan duplex with Tom Heggen, the writer whose comic war novel, Mister Roberts, had been transformed by Josh Logan into a successful Broadway play. In 1949, while Alan was in Hollywood, a maid found Heggen in the bathtub, dead of an overdose of sleeping pills. Alan, aware of Heggen’s severe depression, refused to admit that he might have deliberately killed himself and instead insisted that Tom must have dozed off in the tub. He soon gave up the duplex and moved to California, where he found it increasingly hard to command either the assignments or the money he had received as Dorothy’s partner. A Fox executive urged him to reconcile with his ex-wife, then he would hire them as a team. This did happen after the wedding. In November, they were employed for three weeks.

  In the winter of 1951, he and Dorothy tried to pick up their marriage where they had abandoned it in 1942. They had dinner parties. Dorothy bought a new silver-colored poodle whom she named Misty for the dog she’d owned during the war, and she also allowed Alan to institute a regime aimed at improving her health and appearance. In January, he reported to the Murphys that Dorothy looked and felt terrific after getting a new short haircut and a permanent wave. She now had “a beautiful figure, and feels fine besides,” but this impression was misleading. Their second attempt at matrimony was not proving a success. By this time, Alan must have been getting nervous.

  In mid-April, two men rang the doorbell. Before they could identify themselves as FBI agents, Dorothy knew they meant trouble—because they were wearing hats, she explained afterward. They began by inquiring if she knew Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, then went on to mention other names: Donald Stewart, Ella Winter, and John Howard Lawson. Was she aware that these individuals were Communists? they asked. Had she ever attended a C.P. meeting with them?

  This quiz was merely a prelude. Next came endless questions, quotations from their portable collection of newspaper clippings, references to organizations, rallies, and banquets so unimportant that she could no longer recollect them. Throughout the interrogation, Misty kept barking and jumping on the men, so that Dorothy was frequently obliged to chastise her, although not in a very firm tone because she was probably getting vicarious pleasure from the dog’s refusal to behave. The agents seemed to be curious about Dorothy’s feelings. They repeatedly asked how she felt about this or that group. “Frankly,” she finally said, “I was going through change of life then. How would you have felt?”

  On some points she replied emphatically. When asked if she had ever conspired to overthrow the government of the United States, she assured them, “Listen, I can’t even get my dog to stay down. Do I look to you like someone who could overthrow the government?”

  She impressed them, they wrote afterward, as “a very nervous type of person” who weighed approximately 125 pounds and dressed neatly. “During the course of this interview, she denied ever having been affiliated with, having donated to, or being contacted by a representative of the C.P.” Their report was soon joined by another exhibit, a form letter mailed out over her signature on behalf of the Spanish Refugee League, which Walter Winchell’s office had forwarded to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover with a note:Dear Mr. Hoover:

  Mr. Winchell wondered if you knew about Dorothy Parker, the poet and wit, who led many pro-Russian groups. She and the boss were once good friends, but she became a mad fanatic of the Commy party line.

  The decade-long shadow cast over the country’s history by McCarthy-ism poisoned Dorothy’s personal and professional life and eventually undermined her spirit. She could think of no better term to describe the horror of the anti-Communist inquisition than Dalton Trumbo’s derisive phrase “the time of the toad,” when stool pigeons played the informer to save themselves. Many friends of hers were blacklisted, denounced as traitors, subpoenaed, cited for contempt of Congress, and sentenced to prison terms. Among those close to her, Lillian Hellman managed to foil the House Un-American Activities Committee by refusing to betray friends and still escaping the consequences. Less fortunate were Dashiell Hammett and Ring Lardner, Jr., who ended by serving prison terms. Donald Stewart and Ella Winter avoided subpoenas by moving to England. Practically all of Dorothy’s friends on the board of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, whose national chairman she had been, went to jail after
declining to turn over records to HUAC.

  Dorothy’s deliberately provocative behavior seemed calculated to attract HUAC’s attention. At first, perhaps underestimating the dangers involved, she adopted defiance as the only sane response. In 1947, speaking at a rally to raise money for the defense of Hans Eisler (brother of C.P. leader Gerhart Eisler), she unabashedly informed the audience that she was there to “damn the souls” of the Committee and its chairman, Representative J. Parnell Thomas. The next day she read her remarks in the New York Daily News, along with the information that HUAC planned to subpoena her. The Committee failed to carry out its threat, and no United States deputy marshal arrived at the New Weston bearing a bright pink slip. In September of that year, when Thomas began subpoenaing people in the film industry, she journeyed to Washington in order to attend the hearings in person and did not hesitate to voice her disgust. In New York, she delivered a scorching speech at a fund-raising reception for the nineteen Hollywood directors, actors, and writers who refused to cooperate with the Committee, where she shouted, “For Heaven’s sake, children, Fascism isn’t coming—it’s here. It’s dreadful. Stop it!” Still she was not called to testify, even though she continued to characterize the Committee as a bunch of fools and to denounce the FBI as an agency that she held in “monumental scorn.”

  Beginning in 1949, her name came up regularly as a subversive. In that year, not only was she branded a “Red appeaser” by the California State Senate Committee on Un-American Activities, but at the espionage trial of Judith Coplon, accused of stealing government secrets to aid Russia, an FBI document naming Dorothy and Edward G. Robinson as traitors was read aloud. The accusation made her feel “very sick” because she was glad to be an American, she said. She was acquainted with no Russians—but wished she was—and had no plans to sell them secrets, for the simple reason that she knew none. Robinson denied he had ever been a Party member. No denial was issued by Dorothy, who insisted that she did not “even understand what a Communist organization is.”

  By 1950, the year Senator Joseph McCarthy made his first charges, the FBI had categorized Dorothy as one of four hundred concealed Communists, which they defined as a person “who does not hold himself out as a Communist and who would deny membership in the Party.” The Bureau also quoted an informant as stating that Dorothy had once been considered “queen of the Communists” by her neighbors in Bucks County. The same informant reported that, although Dorothy publicly disparaged HUAC, privately she was more worried than she let on. She had been heard to declare that if the Committee questioned her about the C.P., she would refuse to answer, and she also boasted of having friends in the Justice Department who had offered to get her files removed if the need ever arose. In 1950, she found herself listed in the pamphlet Red Channels, a right-wing compilation of “Communist sympathizers” that the broadcasting and advertising industries adopted as a guide to employment and blacklisting. To be included in Red Channels could be dismissed as a gigantic joke, even as a strange kind of compliment because it also listed liberals like Leonard Bernstein and Marc Connelly. The following year, screenwriter Martin Berkeley singled her out as a top Hollywood Communist. “I was blacklisted,” Dorothy admitted later. While she had never actually been dismissed from a job, she knew that “I couldn’t get another” had she sought employment.

  In 1953, Dorothy read in The New York Times that Senator McCarthy planned to call her as a witness in connection with his investigation of subversive literature in the State Department’s overseas libraries. This proved another false alarm—no subpoena arrived. Should she ever be called, she had decided on the course she would follow. Choices were limited to three: invoke the First Amendment and risk going to prison, take the Fifth and risk blacklisting and possibly imprisonment, or cooperate with the Committee by turning informer. Her choice was to take the Fifth. She agreed with E. M. Forster, who had written that if he were forced to choose between betraying a friend and betraying his country, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country.

  She was finally invited to mount a witness stand in 1955, and then it was strictly a local show, a New York State legislative committee investigating the alleged diversion of millions in charitable contributions to the Communist Party. Dorothy was called because one of the committee’s targets was the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, listed by the U.S. Attorney General as a Communist front. She arrived at the county court house looking smart in a mink jacket over a brown suit, a large Tyrolean-style hat, and a regal smile. Unlike other witnesses who began angrily denouncing the state senators, she controlled her temper. It was true, she told them, that she had made speeches and signed countless letters appealing for funds when she had been national chairman, but she had not composed the letters. As for what had become of the $1.5 million collected to aid refugees from Franco, she had no idea. She knew nothing about the JAFRC’s finances except that the money was used “to help people who were helpless.” Nor did she know if the group was controlled by the C.P.—it had never occurred to her to ask, she said. Dorothy was uniformly polite to all queries except one. Asked if she had ever been a member of the Party, she ferociously invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer on the grounds of possible self-incrimination.

  Shortly after she took the Fifth, the FBI closed its investigation of her. A four-page memorandum, dated April 15, 1955, and reviewing her C.P. activity since 1950, concluded with the following recommendation: “Although the foregoing information reflects CP front activity in the past three years, and the subject could technically qualify for inclusion in the Security Index, it is not felt that she is dangerous enough to warrant her inclusion in same.”

  The summer of 1951, with the Korean War entering its second year, was particularly frightening. In July, Dashiell Hammett was arrested after declining to reveal the names of contributors to a bail fund operated by the Civil Rights Congress, a group largely devoted to supporting the civil rights of Party members. The specter of doom had edged much closer to home than Hammett’s trouble, however. In March, a man known to be a Communist Party leader was appearing before HUAC when one of the Committee members suddenly brought up the name of Alan Campbell.

  MR. TAVENNER. Allen [sic] Campbell was secretary of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Have you talked to him about the affairs of the league?

  MR. JEROME. I decline to answer the question in the exercise of my right against discrimination.

  Representative Frank Tavenner dropped Alan and went on to other individuals, but even that brief mention seemed ominous to Alan. He was shocked. In the thirties, he had gone along with Dorothy’s politics simply because he was her husband, but he had rejected the Party long ago. He was terrified that he would be blacklisted and thus unable to work; indeed he must have already attributed part of his difficulty in getting a job to Dorothy’s politics. Alan was not the only one to feel panic. As Sid Perelman noted, the mood in Hollywood had passed beyond simple anxiety and now rapidly approached frenzy. Many he knew worried about being interned by the FBI—“and people are being so jugged and blacklisted.” He described the film capital as a terrible combination of a boom town gone bust and Nazi Germany in 1935. Dorothy likened the widespread fear to “the smell of a Black Plague.”

  During that summer, Dorothy and Alan planned no dinner parties. After a violent quarrel, Alan walked out and their marriage ended as abruptly as it had resumed. His parting comment, Dorothy later claimed, was to hand her a twenty-dollar bill and tell her not to worry because the rent was paid for a year. Unfortunately, he neglected to mention the furniture. Not long after he left, a store van drove up and movers began to strip the house systematically to the bare walls, although Dorothy was able to rescue her bed.

  More disgusted than bitter, she washed her hands of Alan for a second time, swearing that this time the marriage was dead. For several weeks, she managed on her own. At the end of the summer, despite the barren rooms, she acquired two roommates, Jim Agee and his friend Pat Scallon, a prett
y, fresh-complected twenty-two-year-old whom Dorothy privately christened the Pink Worm. Agee, forty-one, former film critic for Time, and now a highly regarded screenwriter, was enveloped in a full-blown obsession with the young woman, even though he had a family in New York. Like Dorothy, Agee was an alcoholic, but his physical condition was far worse. Earlier that year he had suffered a coronary while working on The African Queen. He was supposed to ease up on liquor and cigarettes, and to eat salads, fruit, and fish, the latter items seldom found in Dorothy’s pantry. Agee smoked and drank as usual and showed no sign of being able to change his regimen. Dorothy told Sid Perelman that one Friday evening he had consumed three bottles of Scotch unaided, which led Perelman to speculate about the quantity she had consumed. Agee looked like a panhandler. Day after day he wore the same filthy, sweaty shirt and pants, the same scuffed black shoes. He badly required a barber, a dentist, and a bath. Other writers at Fox complained about having to eat lunch near him in the commissary.

  Dorothy, who got on well with him, welcomed his company. She was unperturbed about his disregard for personal hygiene, having more than once found herself in a like frame of mind. For that matter, anyone who valued domestic cleanliness would not have remained long in her house. The condition of the place grew increasingly squalid as the weeks went on because arranging for maid or laundry service did not occur to her. She liked having Agee around, especially after one convivial evening when she walked into a tree in the yard, causing her to fall insensible to the ground. She figured that she might have been lying there until morning if Agee had not come along and dragged her inside.