Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  At the awards ceremony, Cowley read a glowing citation that had been composed by Lillian Hellman:To DOROTHY PARKER, born in West End, New Jersey, because the clean wit of her verse and the sharp perception in her stories have produced a brilliant record of our time. Because Miss Parker has a true talent, even her early work gives us as much pleasure today as it did thirty years ago.

  Then, Cowley recalled, an unusual reaction took place. “In 1958 standing ovations were not yet a common occurence. I think there had never yet been one at an Institute Ceremonial. But when Dorothy Parker received her award, the whole audience rose spontaneously as if to prove that, yes, they remembered her work with pleasure. I saw men and women in the audience wiping away tears.”

  As a result of the Waite award, Dorothy became acquainted with Elizabeth Ames, who had established the prize in memory of her sister. Ames, eager to help Dorothy, arranged still another honor, an invitation to Yaddo, the four-hundred-acre haven for artists, writers, and composers that she administered near Saratoga Springs, New York. Since 1926, Yaddo had patronized American arts and letters by operating a sort of sleep-away camp. Its impressive list of alumni included Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, and Aaron Copland, who, among many others, had accomplished important work there. It was hoped that Dorothy would do likewise. While she felt honored, she soon discovered that accepting an invitation to Yaddo presented problems that she had not bargained for. An all-expense-paid exile in the country did not affect her obligation to pay rent at the Volney and, worse, Yaddo did not welcome dogs. Not only would she have to board her current poodle, Cliché, so named because “the streets are carpeted with black French poodles,” but she also would be separated from her pet, a far more serious hardship.

  To stall Elizabeth Ames, she said that an autumn residence would do just as well as a summer one. “My driving idea is work,” she wrote, “and I do so want an unbroken stretch of it, up there.” She could not resist rubbing Ames’s nose in the matter of the ban on dogs. “Fortunately, I know of a place where she [Cliché] has been, when I have to be away, and she has been well and happy there.” She went on to offer a detailed description of the Connecticut kennel—its floor plan, menus, physical-fitness program. Of course, she reminded Ames, no kennel could provide what dogs wanted most, which was “affection. Well, you know—just like two-legged people.”

  The day came when Ames could be put off no further. In September 1958, Dorothy arrived for a two-month stay. She found Yaddo pretty much as advertised: a stone Victorian mansion flanked by woods, a daily routine during which no resident was to be interrupted, and a black metal lunch pail outside her door. In this setting, supposedly idyllic for productivity, she realized at once that she would be devoutly bored. The rustic silence was unnatural. Her writer’s block was invigorated by the country air. The place was filled with the kind of self-conscious, pretentious writers she crossed the street to avoid. Morton Zabel, an English professor from the University of Chicago, was an exception. He struck her as having a fairly decent sense of humor. Sometimes she and Zabel would put their heads together to exchange observations about some of the guests, particularly a pair of hoity-toity young women whose artistic airs had already begun to grate on her nerves.

  After Zabel returned to Chicago and Yaddo was drenched by cold autumnal rains, the estate became soggy and unbearably gloomy. She stayed in her room, pleading illness. “The two young ladies are still here,” she reported to Zabel, “and I doubt if you could notice any change in their manners and ways—you might think, though, that they have got rather more so. There are two new arrivals, scraped from the bottom of that barrel, and I rather think that my illness that has kept me to my room was not entirely due to germs.” In November, when her time ran out, she was overjoyed to escape Yaddo. “I can only say it was good to get back from the dreary wet days and the dreary wet people at Yaddo,” she wrote Zabel once she was safely back at the Volney and reunited with Cliché. It was amazing that she lasted two months.

  Dorothy managed to accomplish practically nothing at Yaddo. Having been without the distraction of a telephone for two months, one of the great attractions of Yaddo, meant nothing to Dorothy, who solved that problem long ago by simply never picking up a ringing phone. She used her time in Saratoga Springs to polish “The Bolt Behind the Blue,” which Esquire published that December. She also must have worked on her book column, but these were tasks she would have done in any case. Although the entire experience had turned out to be a waste of time and an exceptional bore, she went out of her way to compose a gracious bread-and-butter note thanking Mrs. Ames “a million times” for her kindness. She did not wish to appear ungrateful.

  The following spring, she was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, her nomination having been proposed by Van Wyck Brooks and seconded by Louis Untermeyer and Sid Perelman. Brooks termed her a writer of “real importance, unaccountably overlooked, who should have been certainly elected years ago.” That was cold comfort now, although among the dozen new members also selected that year were two equally overlooked women whose company and writings Dorothy had enjoyed since the twenties—Janet Flanner and Djuna Barnes. The Institute insisted on referring to Dorothy as a satirist, a term that usually prompted one of her cracks about “creatures like George S. Kaufman and such who don’t even know what satire is,” but on this occasion she took care to keep her opinions to herself. In her own eyes she was not a satirist, but if they wished to call her one, she would not argue. This time she made sure to reply in writing, cranking out a note so sloppy that it appeared to have been typed in the dark.

  Dear Miss Geffen, my typewriter trembles to tell you how truly elated I am to be a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. I didn’t think this could ever happen to me. Now that it has—there is no living with me. Miss Geffen, I can only say, in older words—I will try to be a good queen. With gratitude,

  Realizing the letter was a hopeless mess, she tried to avoid the need for redoing it by adding a postscript that blamed the typewriter:Please forgive the typing. My typewriter has been overcome, ever since it got the lovely message that I had been elected.

  The afternoon of the induction ceremony found Dorothy in fragile condition because she had prepared for the event with far too many cocktails. Marc Blitzstein, another new member seated next to her, was obliged to look after her. Upon her introduction, she rose with some difficulty and made a brief speech, which consisted of only one sentence. “I never thought I’d make it!” she declared, then quickly sat down again. This left some of Dorothy’s old friends in the audience blinking and trying to imagine her true thoughts, since it was impossible to believe she had ever given a moment’s consideration to the institute. Afterward, Thornton Wilder reported to Frank Sullivan, “Never did I more wish for mind-reading radar than when she stood up and bowed to the assembly.” As it happened, she was probably thinking of nothing because she was on the verge of passing out. Later, in the middle of the keynote address, a talk about abstract painting by Meyer Schapiro, Dorothy suddenly came to and stood to deliver her speech again. Oblivious of Schapiro, she was distinctly heard to blurt out, “I never thought I’d make it!” Blitzstein managed to subdue her with gentle shushing.

  Her gaffe, said Richard Wilbur, is not pleasant to remember, “but it gives some sense of the extent of her drinking at that time: a prepared speech was given both at the right time and at a later, totally wrong, time.” At a reception afterward, her behavior was fine. The star of the party was not a writer at all but Marilyn Monroe, newly married to Arthur Miller, who was there to accept a drama prize. When Louis Untermeyer offered to introduce Dorothy to Monroe, she responded with enthusiasm and wriggled her way to the head of the line.

  Arnold Gingrich talked her into participating in a two-day symposium being cosponsored by Esquire and Columbia University, in which her colleagues on the panel were to be a trio of young male writers with big reputations—Saul Bellow, Wrig
ht Morris, and Leslie Fiedler. Flattered and swayed by the fifteen-hundred-dollar fee, Dorothy decided to accept. All she had to do was deliver a speech and comment briefly on the role of the writer in America.

  The militant styles of Morris and Fiedler caught her by surprise. They began attacking the way America corrupted its writers with foundation grants, prizes, even invitations to perform like tame bears at events like this one. Clearly Morris and Fiedler were eager to bite Esquire’s hand. Since ingratitude had long been Dorothy’s typical reaction to handouts, she felt startled and then indignant. Hearing them beef about how badly writers were treated, a subject on which she had been discoursing for forty years, she perversely rushed to the opposite side. For the first time in years, she had managed to pick up a few philanthropic plums, and she was taken aback to hear these people disclaiming prizes and writers’ camps.

  When it came time to deliver her speech the following evening, she was eager to throw sand in the gears of her fellow panelists. Backstage, looking nervous and wobbly, she made a futile attempt to exchange small talk with Leslie Fiedler. “She kept remarking on my teeth with the general air of Little Red Riding Hood remarking on the dentures of the Wolf.” Laying her hand on his shoulder, she said, “Be kind to Mother,” words that mystified him since he was over forty and no longer considered himself particularly youthful. And her references to his teeth were totally puzzling. To Dorothy, the atmosphere of the symposium must have summoned up images of creatures with sharp teeth.

  At the podium, she apologized for being alive, confessed apprehension being on the same program with such distinguished gentlemen, and warned that since she, unlike them, was not an intellectual, anything she said would be relatively worthless. Then she got down to business. She couldn’t understand why the men were crabbing. Did the poor dears expect special treatment? A writer, she said, should be prepared to suffer in silence. As for the role of the writer in society, the subject of the symposium, she defined it very simply: The writer was a worker whose business it was to write. She graphically likened her proletarian writer to an Aesop walking through a forest on a dark night, when suddenly a wolf pops out of the trees and bites him on the leg.

  “There!” cries the wolf to Aesop. “Go home and write a fable about that!”

  She was sick of writers who always found something to bellyache about. They should shut up and get to work. She went on complaining about writers who complained until she could think of nothing more to say and tottered back to her seat.

  She was, Saul Bellow thought, the most pleasant of the panelists because “she was the quietest.” She was also the funniest, having taken care to deliver her barbs with humor. The audience laughed approvingly. At the close of the discussion that night, she was surrounded by autograph seekers. When she had time to look up, Bellow, Morris and Fiedler were gone.

  Arnold Gingrich sent a letter of congratulations. He thought she had been “terrific” and said, “Actually you said more in inverse proportion to the time you spent on your feet than all the rest of the panel put together.” To Dorothy’s mind, she had made a “truly horrible” spectacle of herself. “I turned my face to the wall and was hostess to an attack of flu.”

  She made an appearance with Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, on a television program called Open End. In recent years, she had become friendly with Capote, whom she admired as a writer of quality, but she had never been able to forgive Mailer for the dog incident. Later, she referred to him as “that awful man who stabbed his wife.”

  That evening, a limousine picked her up at the hotel and dumped her at a studio in the wilds of Newark, New Jersey, a location sufficiently out of the way to put her in a bad mood. Making no concessions to the requirements of a public appearance, she had dressed herself in a black shawl and shapeless skirt and carelessly applied her makeup. The overpowdered tip of her nose suggested to Mailer the white button of a clown.

  If she looked like part of a Ringling Brothers act, the appearances of her co-panelists were equally arresting. Mailer arrived wearing Cro-Magnon chin whiskers suggestive of Fidel Castro’s, and Capote had the slinky air of a tiny, golden Theda Bara. Dorothy quickly rebuffed Mailer’s overtures and plainly showed so much preference for Capote that Mailer was offended.

  In the early part of the show, moderator David Susskind tried to put Dorothy at ease, a maneuver she fiercely resisted. In a low, quavering voice, she saluted E. M. Forster, skewered Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac, and declared that the fiction she was condemned to read for Esquire was trash. The sex scenes in current fiction were, she complained, “all the same.” When Susskind wondered what most disturbed her about contemporary America, she listed injustice, intolerance, stupidity, and segregation—particularly segregation.

  After that, the proceedings were upstaged by a windy and aggressive Mailer and a tough Capote who demolished Mailer at every turn. As the men increasingly hogged the limelight, Dorothy contributed less and less until finally she sat silently, slumped in her chair, as if she were waiting to be cut down from the cross. Open End was so named because it remained on the air as long as its guests and the moderator liked. On this particular Sunday night in January 1959, Open End continued for almost two hours.

  As they walked off the set, they noticed technicians examining a kinescope and stopped to watch. Dorothy glanced at herself and groaned in dismay.

  “No,” she protested to Susskind, “I really don’t want to see another instant of it.” He ushered her away with all the tact and delicacy of a funeral director exhibiting a decomposed corpse, and she rode back alone to Manhattan with her ego reduced to the size of a pea.

  Aware that she was not telegenic, she nevertheless could not have appreciated reading one reviewer’s unflattering comment that she had resembled Eleanor Roosevelt. Great as her admiration for Mrs. Roosevelt was, she did not care to look like her.

  Dorothy, wrote Edmund Wilson in his diary, “had somewhat deteriorated, had big pouches under her eyes.” One Saturday afternoon he visited her at the Volney.

  I was glad to see all the evidences of her having returned to her old kind of writing: a typewriter with manuscript beside it, piles of books she is reviewing for Esquire. But it is just the same kind of life that she used to live in New York before she spent so many years in Hollywood. It is as if her work in Hollywood and her twice marrying Alan Campbell had counted for nothing—she might as well have been in fairy-land. Bob Benchley is dead, Campbell has left her again. She lives with a small and nervous bad-smelling poodle bitch, drinks a lot, and does not care to go out.

  She served him several drinks, “as was inevitable in this atmosphere of the twenties.” Wilson, feeling as if he had stepped backward in time, went away depressed.

  Day to day, the friend she saw most regularly was Bea Stewart, whose East Side apartment became the scene of countless gossipy cocktail hours. A lavish dispenser of very dry martinis and a middle-aged divorcee living without a man, Bea knew about loneliness and boredom. She was a loyal friend, but Dorothy failed to appreciate her properly, devotion or no devotion. The person whose company she most prized was Lillian Hellman, even though Hellman had little time for her and eventually began to avoid her. Dorothy didn’t care. Hellman was a wonderful audience who went into stitches over Dorothy’s remarks, which in turn set off Dorothy’s own laughter. On Saint Patrick’s Day, 1957, Hellman invited her to drive to her house in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Throughout a long day of motoring, Dorothy did her best to keep Lilly entertained with stories disparaging the Irish. Hellman recalled that the invective flowing from her mouth “was amazing in variety and sometimes in length. Driving does not go with laughing too much, and the more I laughed, the more remarkable grew her anger with the Irish. By the time we got to the traffic on Major Deegan Parkway, they were even responsible for Hitler’s Holocaust.” When they finally arrived on the island and Hellman announced her eagerness to prepare a Saint Patrick’s Day supper, Dorothy flatly told her to forget it. She couldn’
t possibly eat a bite in the name of Saint Patrick.

  “Let’s change the name to Saint Justin,” suggested Hellman, who was not only passionately fond of food but also a good cook.

  “Who in hell is Saint Justin?” Dorothy asked.

  Hellman could not remember, but that evening she prepared a luscious meal of roast duck, green beans in a warm vinaigrette, and crepes for dessert.

  On another drive to Martha’s Vineyard, they broke the journey at Portland, Connecticut, where they stopped to spend the night with Hellman’s close friend Richard Wilbur and his family. Hellman warned Wilbur that Dorothy was permitted only one drink at cocktail time, that this arrangement had been agreed upon between them beforehand. It was apparently a condition of taking her to the Vineyard that she limit herself to a single drink, for purposes of relaxation. This might seem sensible to a nonalcoholic, but for Dorothy it amounted to abstinence. The self-denial, the torment of being unable to assuage her craving, was the same. When drinks were served, Wilbur brought her a martini. For a long while it remained on the table, untouched, seemingly unnoticed, as she chatted easily with the others, who were busy sipping their cocktails. Then, Wilbur recalled, “suddenly she took the drink and drank it off in one motion.”

  Hellman’s exacting such a promise may have been as much or more for her sake as for Dorothy’s because her tolerance for hard drinkers was low. Dashiell Hammett’s alcoholism had disturbed her greatly. As his drinking grew more self-destructive after the war, she began to see less of him. He rented an apartment in New York and later, after his release from prison, friends offered him a cottage in Katonah, New York.