Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  Her references to Alan were limited to a fervent declaration that she and her late husband had spent “29 great years together.” She made them sound like Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and probably at the time that was the way she wished to regard their marriage.

  In the months after his death, when she was numbed by intense misery, a number of good Samaritans stepped forward to look after her, but she resisted them. Perhaps the person toward whom she felt least antagonistic was Sally Foster, whom she called “my angel” and came to depend upon. In the mornings, she prepared herself tea and toast and opened cans for the animals, but that was all she could manage. Each day Foster came to the house with a casserole or freshly baked bread; she made sure that Dorothy had clean clothes, and she picked up the open cans of dog food that were spoiling in the corners; she was sensible, cheerful, and devoted. Concerned about Dorothy’s drinking, she begged her to abstain at least until five o’clock. Sometimes she hid bottles on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinets where Dorothy could not reach them.

  “We don’t have any liquor in the house,” Dorothy reminded her.

  “Of course you do,” Foster replied. “It’s right where it always has been.”

  But what good was inaccessible Scotch? Instead of arguing, she made a trip to Shermart and bought more.

  On the afternoons that Charles Brackett visited, he usually brought something to drink. Fred Shroyer, turning up with wine and a loaf of her favorite San Francisco sourdough bread, told her playfully, “I’ve got the wine and the bread and now you must supply the verses.” So many friends invited her to restaurants that it seemed people were obsessed by her nutrition. Dorothy, however, was all but oblivious to food. Lack of appetite resulted in loss of weight and strength and, eventually, malnutrition. Invited to John Carlyle’s house for dinner, she stared at two lamb chops on her plate but felt too weak to deal with them. Her host cut the meat for her.

  She wanted to show appreciation, but the well-meaning, solicitous people got on her nerves. Sitting on the sofa while watching Sally Foster bustle around with a dustcloth gave her a seizure of guilt because she knew Sally had her own family and home to look after.

  “You shouldn’t be doing that,” she told her.

  Foster shrugged. “Somebody has to do it.”

  Dorothy lit another Chesterfield. Now that she was smoking two or sometimes three packs a day, her usual cough had become even worse. “My God,” she murmured, “it’s awful to get old, Sally.”

  She fiercely resisted people trying to straighten out her life, even though her helplessness provoked it. All she wanted was to be left alone so that she could drink in peace. In this goal she often succeeded. Nina Foch noticed that she looked like a sleepwalker when she walked the dogs. “When she stepped off the curb you knew she didn’t even see it.” On four occasions, she lost her balance and fell in the street. Once, when she was bleeding from a cut on the back of the head, she stubbornly refused to go to the hospital. In November, after she complained of severe arthritic pain in her shoulder, friends finally induced her to see a doctor. X-rays showed that it was broken. On the weekend of John Kennedy’s assassination, she was in Cedars of Lebanon hospital. With the other women in her room, she kept her eyes glued to the television set the entire time. Sunk in sorrow, she scarcely noticed her surroundings or her broken shoulder.

  Other physical problems arose after Alan’s death. When her legs and feet began to swell, her doctor advised keeping her feet elevated to alleviate the edema. Clement Brace rigged up a special pillow that she could take wherever she went to prop up her legs. Since the broken shoulder made it painful to lift her arms, she had trouble dressing and undressing. After an evening with Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, she slept in her clothing. First thing the next morning, she called Sally Foster. “You have to come over here right away and unzip my dress.”

  Although Sally Foster was devoted to Dorothy, her patience had limits. One day she stopped in to take care of business connected with Alan’s insurance. It was after five, and Dorothy had a visitor who was taking her out for dinner. Irritated by Foster’s appearance, she did not wait until her friend was out of earshot before giving vent to her feelings. “Wouldn’t you know it,” she said to her guest. “She had the whole day to do this and she has to get here just as I’m going out.” This hurt Foster so deeply that she never returned to the house.

  Various other Samaritans took her place. As always, Dorothy was adept at getting people to do favors for her.

  Since the day of Alan’s overdose, she refused to set foot in his room. She did not want to touch his clothing or possessions. Friends were forced to rummage through bureau drawers to learn that he had made no will and that a tiny insurance policy named Horte as his beneficiary. Dorothy, in the meantime, continued to mourn by secluding herself indoors and drinking as much as was practical. In the early months of 1964, she finally began to emerge from her lethargy and organize a departure. The house was put on the market and eventually sold to actress Peggy Sears, although most of the down payment had to be used for termite control. Cliché died, and she gave away Limey and two of the poodle puppies, keeping for herself only Troisième, whose name she shortened to Troy. As for the household furnishings, she was emphatic about getting rid of the last spoon. She wanted to make “a clean sweep” when she left California.

  Since it looked as if she was going to walk away and simply abandon the furniture, Miranda Levy offered to arrange a house sale and placed advertisements in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. On the morning of the sale, she tried to talk her into leaving the house and spending the day at Estelle Winwood’s. Levy thought it would be, painful for her to watch strangers handling her belongings. But Dorothy planted herself in an armchair and sat there watchfully, holding a peculiar kind of court. A sizable crowd showed up, gawkers as well as bona fide purchasers. Levy thought it strange how little visible reaction Dorothy had to the whole proceedings. Even though she obviously needed the money, she seemed determined to undermine the sale. Several times Levy heard her tell a buyer, “Here, you can have it.”

  Few of Dorothy’s friends showed up. Some dismissed the articles as valueless, while others felt intimidated. If she had bought anything, Sally Foster said, “Dottie would have thought that I was just waiting to get hold of it. That was the way her mind worked.”

  At the end of March, she was escorted to the airport by Clement Brace and John Dall, who shepherded her into the plane with her foot pillow, arranged Troy on her lap, and kissed her good-bye. In her blue-and-white polka-dot dress and her red shoes, she looked like a patriotic, bedraggled sparrow.

  Chapter 19

  LADY OF THE CORRIDOR

  1964-1967

  Little had changed at the Volney. Dreamlike, the fading women took up their stations in the lobby, the same bowls of fruit and trays of pastries waited expectantly in the dining room entrance, and the tiny passenger elevator continued to present hazards for corpses. The hotel looked like a stage set for a fictitious New York hotel on the Upper East Side.

  She moved into an apartment on the eighth floor, a little smaller than the one she’d had before and slightly less expensive. Aside from a few pots of ivy and the addition of a shelf for her Napoleon figures, she made no attempt to alter the basic institutional look of the place. All furnished apartments, she said, tend to resemble dentists’ waiting rooms anyway.

  For the remainder of that year and continuing well into 1965, she was in and out of the hospital, “so sick I couldn’t write a darn thing.” Her broken shoulder still troubled her and she developed bursitis in the other shoulder. She made jokes about her cardiovascular problems, saying that “the doctors were very brave about it” but did not find her hospitalizations for pneumonia, broken bones, and fractures caused by various spills at all amusing. She fell a lot, no matter how careful she was. Some of these mishaps occurred while she was drinking, but by no means all of them. The dismaying truth was that she had shrunk to eighty pounds an
d her eyesight had deteriorated so badly that she could see little without her glasses. In August, when biographer Nancy Milford came to see her about Zelda Fitzgerald, she found Dorothy with her arm in a sling, living with a practical nurse. Health permitting, she nearly always agreed to interviews because she was all too seldom the center of attention now. Company propelled her into brief bursts of energy and provided occasions to put on one of the pretty pastel dusters that she liked to wear. Milford arrived with an armful of daisies, homage that pleased Dorothy very much. Zelda, she informed Milford, was not a particularly beautiful woman. According to Dorothy, she had the sulky kind of face usually found adorning the lids of candy boxes. In retrospect, she wished that she had been kinder to poor Zelda. She impressed Milford as “a bird in hiding. As I was leaving and going to the elevator, I could still see her peeking around the door.” Others, who knew her well but had not seen her since she went west to rejoin Alan, found her physical changes shocking. Alan’s death had aged her greatly. Meeting her at a party, Stella Adler was appalled to see how frail and wasted she was, as if she were “a hundred years old.”

  She could not get along without the nurse, a middle-aged woman who wore a frilly organdy apron over her uniform. The nurse was Dorothy’s daily companion for almost a year because she could not bathe herself. Even after she had regained her strength, she still needed help with dressing and lifting. The woman’s presence was probably therapeutic in other respects because it gave Dorothy a reason to complain. And she did—about the nurse’s stupidity, her high-handed manner, the plastic tablecloth she had bought for the apartment, a tablecloth so dreadful that it could not even pass for pop art.

  Someone pointed out that it would be prudent to put her affairs in order by making a will. One of Lillian Hellman’s attorneys, Oscar Bernstien, came to the Volney to draw up the papers. It did not take long to dispose of her estate, since in her view she had no estate whatsoever, neither property nor insurance. Taking inventory, she was forced to concede that she did own fifty or sixty shares of New Yorker common stock that she guessed might be worth something, and she also had two savings accounts at the Chemical Bank, containing the money she had collected from the sale of the Norma Place house. Modest as these assets were, she knew exactly what she wanted done with them. When Bernstien arrived, she told him that her estate, plus any copyrights and royalties from her writings, were to go to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and in the event of his death, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This bequest did not cause Bernstien to blink an eye. As his widow, Rebecca, said, “He understood completely what she had in mind. It seemed natural because she had no heirs, and racial injustice had always affected her very deeply.” Dorothy wanted Lillian Hellman to act as her literary executor. She also directed that her body was to be cremated and that there be no funeral services, either formal or informal.

  After making the will, she joked to Zero Mostel that the least she could do was die. She was by no means ready, however.

  For the first time in her life, she had a legitimate pretext to avoid writing. “I can’t use my typewriter,” she announced with the triumph of a person who has spent fifty years seeking such an excuse. Since she was unable to write, naturally she wanted to. “The people at Esquire have been wonderfully patient, and I hope to get back to work very soon,” she said. She stacked the review copies still being sent to her on the floor behind an armchair. She also talked about writing “more stories and maybe a play. I’d love to do another play.” In recent years she had become increasingly preoccupied with the idea of “making it” as a writer, whatever that term meant to her. Five years earlier, on her induction into the National Institute of Arts and Letters, it seemed as though she might have “made it,” but that assurance had quickly worn off. In her own eyes, she definitely had failed to make it and probably never would, no matter what the National Institute decided about her worth. Still, the thought of dying after a lifetime of meager accomplishment filled her with shame and melancholy.

  Even though holding her arms up to the typewriter for more than a few minutes was an immense effort, she managed to compose a thousand-word caption to accompany John Koch’s paintings of Manhattan life. In the November 1964 issue of Esquire, she contributed a lyrical tribute to his graceful ladies and gentlemen, an evocation of the world of Edith Wharton and Henry James that perhaps recalled some precious shadows from her own past:I am always a little sad when I see a John Koch painting. It is nothing more than a bit of nostalgia that makes my heart beat slower—nostalgia for those rooms of lovely lights and lovelier shadows and loveliest people. And I really have no room for the sweet, soft feeling. Nor am I honest, perhaps, in referring to it. For it is the sort of nostalgia that is only a dreamy longing for some places where you never were.

  And, I never will be there. There is no such hour on the present clock as 6:30, New York time. Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you’ll live through the night.

  It was her final magazine article but not her last piece of writing. That was for Roddy McDowall, a talented photographer as well as actor, who was publishing a volume of his photographs and asked her to contribute a brief commentary for two pictures of Oscar Levant, a man she had always liked. The four paragraphs she gave McDowall for Double Exposure were badly typed and full of typographical errors, actually not even very well written, but they were pointedly honest. In paying tribute to Levant, she became defensive on his behalf, although it is possible to see how she may have been identifying with him. “Over the years, Oscar Levant’s image—that horrible word—was of a cocky young Jew who made a luxurious living by saying mean things about his best friends and occasionally playing the piano for a minute if he happened to feel like it.” Even though people said Levant felt sorry for himself, she said, “he isn’t and never was; he never went about with a begging-bowl extended for the greasy coins of pity. He is, thank heaven, not humble. He has no need to be.”

  She was uncomfortably aware of her own begging-bowl extended in pretend meekness. Hospital bills were a great problem, because she had no medical insurance and depended on the sudden materialization of Samaritans to bail her out. Unfortunately, Samaritans were in increasingly short supply. It became necessary for the faithful Bea Stewart to make phone calls notifying various people about Dorothy’s plight. On one occasion, after Stewart’s canvassing had produced no results, she hesitantly sought out Lillian Hellman. When Dorothy learned of it, she was furious and called Bea “a damned little meddler” who had no shame calling half of New York and describing Dorothy as “a pleading beggar.” In emergencies, Hellman was her next-to-last resort. Her final resort was The Viking Press, to which she turned in times of extreme desperation. Harold Guinzburg was dead, and the place was full of strangers, who no doubt found her more a burden than an asset as an author.

  Throughout these years, her royalties from books and recordings brought in a modest income. Occasionally there would be a reprint, for example twenty-five dollars from the Readers’ Digest, but generally the check was so small that it hardly seemed worth a trip to the bank. Sometimes she tossed the check into a drawer and forgot about it, an old habit that used to drive Alan crazy. Some of her friends, mystified about the source of her income, speculated that she must be receiving checks from wealthy benefactors. The list of those who were assumed to have covered her expenses included John O’Hara, Quentin Reynolds, and Joan Whitney Payson. If this was true, Dorothy never acknowledged the charitable contributions. As one who had no problem taking from the rich, she was not prepared to refuse “greasy coins of pity,” but on the other hand, she saw no reason to publicize it either.

  In the meantime, Leah Salisbury continued to encourage first-class producers who might successfully adapt Dorothy’s work for the stage. To represent her now, especially when she was ill or depressed, a literary agent had to be inventive. Immediately after Alan’s death, Salisbury was unsure of her address. She had been obliged
to issue a firm warning that “this time I must hear from you, Dorothy,” and suggested a novel system of communication. “To make it easy for you I send you an additional copy of this letter, and a spot below marked both ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ ” Salisbury instructed her to check one and “to make the whole business still easier here is an addressed return envelope.” Dorothy had meekly penned an X next to her name and mailed back the letter. At the Volney, when she felt unwell and asked the switchboard to hold her calls, Salisbury was screened out with the rest. She left stacks of messages. After a while, feeling pressured or guilty, Dorothy returned Salisbury’s calls. It was not a particularly ideal way to conduct business, but it worked well enough.

  In the spring of 1965, she began to recover and enthusiastically sent the nurse packing. For the remainder of that year and for much of the following one, she awoke in the morning feeling more cheerful than she had in a long while. Once again her name appeared in newspapers and magazines. She welcomed a reporter from the Ladies’ Home Journal but warned she would not discuss the Algonquin. For an Associated Press photographer, she carefully dolled herself up in her polka-dot dress and pearls, posing demurely under the shelf of Napoleon generals with Troy balanced on her lap. A story on the society page of the New York Herald Tribune described her as “a bird that has had a tough winter, but is beginning to grow new feathers.” It was true that she did feel rejuvenated. Suddenly she longed to romp in society, go to restaurants, attend new plays, even visit a discotheque. For the first time in twenty years, she made an excursion to the Algonquin Hotel, where she had made a date to meet friends. While waiting in the lobby, seated in an armchair facing the entrance to the Rose Room, she quickly drew the attention of the hotel management. Andrew Anspach came over to greet her. During their conversation, he could not resist asking her if she disliked the Algonquin because over the years she had made many derogatory remarks about the hotel. Dorothy smiled. That wasn’t the case at all, she assured him, “but it’s difficult to get terribly interested in food I digested forty-five years ago.”