The Last Days of Dorothy Parker

by Marion Meade

  Their conversation, Lillian told Best, made her feel sick at her stomach.

  Afterward, Keats crafted a two-page, single-spaced letter of apology, in which he confessed to being “heartily sick of you, me, Viking, my agent, Dorothy Parker, and writing books for a living.”121 There was nothing more to say. Nevertheless, she continued to fight him with insults (“hack,” “upstart,” “bastard”) and poked fun at his name – John Keats – as if sharing a name with a dead poet automatically made him a fraud.122

  •

  Lilly appeared intent on withholding approval of everything that could keep Parker’s name alive: A testy no was her answer to irksome queries from theatrical organizations, libraries, and professional societies like the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Gradually scripts were shelved, book ideas dropped, institutions disregarded, requests politely denied. When the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) needed to update its files on Dottie, she pleaded ignorance about the proper way to fill out a questionnaire. And when Bea Stewart presented a friend of hers with a Ladies of the Corridor script, Lilly demanded its return and then spread the word that Bea was a drunk.123 All of this proved detrimental, and soon a fog seemed to settle over Dottie’s very existence.

  The notable exception was John Keats’s biography, You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker, whose publication she was unable to prevent. Viking, it turned out, decided to reject the manuscript on the basis of quality. (There were whispers that it contained an unacceptable number of errors.) After revisions, it was released by Simon & Schuster in 1970, but problems remained. The book, which showed signs of being inadequately researched and hastily written, was marred by the biographer’s patronizing view of his subject and also appeared curiously tone-deaf about women in general. No doubt out of frustration (or desperation), Keats was not above quoting from interviews with people who did not truly know Dottie, but offered steamy stories of drunkenness and sexual exhibitionism. Perhaps all this was predictable given Lilly’s relentless and effective campaign to muzzle witnesses. Only a few (Wyatt Cooper, Beatrice Stewart and her former husband Donald) dared to identify themselves. A chilling sentence in the author’s note that understated the vendetta said that Lillian Hellman chose “not to be involved with this biography in any way.”124 The book, to Lilly, would forever remain “that awful biography of Dottie.”125 Another biography of Dottie would not appear for eighteen years.

  •

  For all the aggravation connected with Dottie’s estate, the fall of 1967 would be a particularly happy period for Lilly. At Lincoln Center, rehearsals were under way for the first New York revival of The Little Foxes since 1939, featuring an all-star cast (Anne Bancroft, George C. Scott, and Margaret Leighton) under the direction of Mike Nichols. A close friend – one of her inner circle that included John Hersey, Jules Feiffer, William Styron, and Hannah Weinstein – and also her neighbor on the Vineyard, Nichols was now a heavyweight director in both New York and Hollywood, whose latest film, The Graduate, had proved a sensation. The Little Foxes represented his return to Broadway.

  Unsurprisingly, the revival brought forth a batch of breathless reviews, the best of Lilly’s career, and comments such as “magnificent” and “thrilling,” even critics who found it “better than the original.” 126 It didn’t get much better than that.

  Savoring her biggest splash of publicity in years, she welcomed a New York Times reporter to her home where she sat in her elegant parlor talking about clothes. “I buy Balenciaga when I can afford him. I like very cheap or very good clothes. Middle clothes are such junk, don’t you think?” She bought coats locally because “I’m in love with Ohrbach’s coat department.”127 On a tour of the house, the reporter noticed at her bedside two phones, a radio, and books by Nathanael West and Bertolt Brecht. The headline “Furniture Collection That Charts Lillian Hellman’s Career” might just as well have read “Lives of Rich and Famous Playwrights.”

  Among the rapturous reviews, however, was one savage attack that seemed to come out of nowhere. The reviewer was the formidable Elizabeth Hardwick who, in the New York Review of Books, deliberately went after the play – and its author – with a machete. A Southerner herself, she hated Lilly’s portrayals of blacks and whacked the play as sentimental Southern goo that she felt was clichéd, awkward, and dated.

  A few weeks later, the most distinguished literary critic of the time bounded to Lilly’s defense. The Little Foxes, Edmund Wilson declared sympathetically, was neither old-fashioned nor melodramatic. Indeed, it was Hardwick who was misreading Hellman’s work. In addition to Wilson’s, the New York Review published letters from Penelope Gilliatt, Richard Poirier, and Felicia Bernstein weighing in their objections to the review. Refusing to back down, Hardwick responded with additional insults and went on to call the play’s lead male character a boring puppet. Clearly, she had it in for Lilly.

  Although Lilly pretended indifference, Hardwick’s suggestion that she was a bad writer jangled her. Her eight original plays and four adaptations spanned thirty-three years in the theater. By this time she was a veteran, recognized as one of the most gifted playwrights of her generation, certainly in a class by herself as the best woman dramatist. Battling the good old boys club of Broadway theater, she had made them pay attention by delivering the goods.

  Perhaps, she thought, Hardwick was disgruntled over Lilly’s cozy relationship with her poet husband, Robert Lowell (who was soon to leave her for Lady Caroline Blackwood). Normally, when somebody punched Lilly, she hit back, but she let it go this time because she was in a cheerful mood. Nothing could take away her pleasure in a lovely revival of Little Foxes, but now she was looking for different things to do.

  Chapter 7

  WALL STREET

  (1968–1976)

  Martin Luther King was killed by an assassin’s bullet nine months after Dottie’s death. On April 4, 1968, visiting Memphis to support striking sanitation workers, he was staying at the Lorraine Motel. It was almost 6 P.M., and he was standing on the motel’s second-floor balcony, speaking with Jesse Jackson in the parking lot below.

  “Jesse, I want you to come to dinner with me,” he called down.128 There was talk of wearing neckties for dinner, and somebody else said to bring coats for the chilly night. Suddenly a single bullet ripped into Dr. King’s cheek and caused him to fall backward onto the concrete, unconscious. He died an hour later at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

  Two months passed before a fugitive from Missouri State Penitentiary, a petty thief by the name of James Earl Ray, was charged with the crime.129

  After Dr. King’s death, the Parker estate automatically became the property of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Henceforward, her work would rest in the hands of a civil rights organization that had no experience in managing literary properties. The NAACP had a powerful legal division but no department for dealing with poetry and fiction.130 Additionally, no precedent existed for this kind of situation.

  Dating back to a time when African Americans were called “colored people,” the fifty-nine-year-old organization had initially devoted its energy to fighting lynchings and Jim Crow laws. By the late 1960s, it had scored important victories by means of litigation, among these the Supreme Court decision ending desegregation in elementary schools (Brown v. Board of Education). Yet, as times changed, the NAACP had to face increasingly fierce competition from controversial new activist groups such as the Student National Coordinating Committee working on voter registration in Alabama. The important issues to these groups tended to be polarizing – the emergence of the black power movement, the Vietnam War – and figures like Stokely Carmichael were considered cutting-edge.

  “Radical chic” became the popular term for so-called extremist political causes supported by celebrities. At their Park Avenue penthouse, Leonard and Felicia Bernstein feted the Black Panthers, a militant group formed by Huey Newt
on and Bobby Seale, at a party where guests wearing Afros nibbled Roquefort cheese balls rolled in crushed nuts. In a dig at the NAACP, the journalist Tom Wolfe wrote of the occasion, “There are no civil rights Negroes wearing gray suits three sizes too big – these are real men.”131

  Hellman’s stewardship of Dottie’s literary affairs ended on the day King died because the estate laws giving the NAACP absolute ownership made an executor unnecessary. Regardless, she chose to thumb her nose at them and continued to administer the estate, bristling at those who tried to interfere. Although it was Viking that granted permission to reprint Parker’s fiction and verse, everything else had to obtain the executor’s approval. To all appearances the gatekeeper appeared to be Lilly, not the NAACP. Treating every request with frosty condescension, she almost always denied.

  In an attempt to have things both ways, she displayed total indifference to Dottie in one breath; in the next, she held on for dear life. One minute she was disregarding Ferncliff’s entreaties to remove the ashes; the next, going to court against the NAACP to retain her position. Over her loud complaints, a ruling terminated her fiduciary capacity and gave total control to the NAACP in 1972.

  This was not the end, however, because she continued to revile them every chance she got. Using the New York Times Book Review as a pulpit, she made certain to bring up the subject of Dottie’s estate. In the course of an interview with Nora Ephron, a personal friend, she called it “a bad story. I was executor, as you know. When King died, it turned out I was no longer executor – everything passed to the NAACP, of course.” To which she added, “I was so stupid that I assumed I would be executor of the estate until I died.”

  Predictably, she went on, bad things happened. “Poor Dottie. Now the NAACP has sold the rights to all her work for a Broadway musical.”132 (That was an outright lie.)

  •

  In seven years Lilly had not made peace with Dottie’s departure. The ashes had not been called for and the storage bill was left unpaid, until finally Ferncliff Cemetery lost patience and insisted on removal of the remains. Only after losing the executorship and her lawsuit did Lilly accept reality: Dottie’s estate was no longer her responsibility. When pressured by Ferncliff, she told them to mail the ashes to the office of Dottie’s attorneys, Bernstien and O’Dwyer, LLP,133 in the financial district at 63 Wall Street.

  Delivery of the package in July 1973 presented a dilemma because nobody had the vaguest notion of what to do. Since the firm didn’t wish to offend Hellman, a valued client, the issue was never presented to Dottie’s rightful executor, as it should have been. Instead, Paul O’Dwyer quietly stashed the box in his private office, in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet, a few feet behind his desk. As he would later explain, they planned to wait for instructions from Lillian. Months passed: Oscar Bernstien died and O’Dwyer, who had begun as a clerk and worked his way up, became the heart of the firm. Around the same time, he had been pursuing a political career and was serving as City Council president. Gradually, interest in Parker’s ashes faded. “I didn’t hear any kind of outcry,” O’Dwyer recalled. “Most people didn’t even know where the hell they were.”134

  In a busy office the years slip by, and a package at the bottom of a file cabinet can easily go unnoticed. O’Dwyer, however, had not forgotten and sometimes mentioned the ashes to various friends. On one occasion, he showed the box to the writer Malachy McCourt, who remembered meeting Dottie years earlier. As a young man at a Hollywood party, he began bantering with an amusing woman who said she wrote “little things” but didn’t give her name.135 When McCourt proclaimed her unbelievably sexy and playfully propositioned her, Dottie, who was in her late sixties then, called him a bigger than average jerk.

  Probably the only person to pay his respects to Dottie during her file cabinet period was McCourt.

  Anticapitalist, pro-Communist, ultra-anarchist, Dottie had always intensely disliked Wall Street and all it stood for. Life had taught her, she lamented in her story “The Garter,” to “never trust a round garter or a Wall Street man.”136 Spending eternity in the financial district, in a drawer, was the biggest joke of her life. Regrettably, she could not be there to appreciate it.

  •

  Shortly after Dottie died, Lilly changed occupations. Having spent the better part of three decades as a dramatist, from her triumphant debut with The Children’s Hour to the embarrassingly short-lived My Mother, My Father and Me, she was bored by the theater and decided to close this chapter of her life. For celebrated writers like herself, the next step was often autobiography – a successful model was the posthumous Hemingway memoir A Moveable Feast – but she disliked the genre almost as much as she hated biography. On the plus side, memoir combined literary talent with the ancient practice of revenge.

  How to piece together a personal account without writing a conventional memoir posed a challenge, as did telling her story without revealing confidential information about friends and family. No account of hers could exclude Hammett or Parker, the two of them sticklers for the absolute truth. Dash alive had been capable of the most vicious attacks on her honesty; Dottie alive had extraordinary sensitivity to pretense and hypocrisy. But this was no longer a concern. Scores were waiting to be settled.

  •

  At her house in Vineyard Haven, she was entertaining Nora Ephron, who had been assigned by the Times Book Review to conduct a Q & A interview. For two days Ephron followed her around with a notebook as Lilly cooked, coughed (from a bronchial infection), and talked nonstop. Asked to explain how she came to write An Unfinished Woman, she said that the book was “faute de mieux,” something to do.137 Sick of writing plays, she found herself at loose ends and looked for a way to pass the time. Her original idea was to punch up old magazine pieces, a matter of developing the ideas, adding extra padding to give them dramatic effect, turning her experiences into theatrical events.

  Wasn’t it interesting, Ephron observed, that all her main characters were dead. Lilly said she hadn’t realized it at the outset; in fact, she didn’t even notice until after publication. Without offering details about the reason for this belated epiphany, she did admit feeling liberated when she wrote about dead people. Besides, the way she figured it, she was the protagonist, telling the stories in her voice and expressing her feelings.

  Her first public announcement of the autobiography had appeared four months after Dottie’s death, in another interview with the Times. Among her comments about furniture and her favorite coat store was a significant sentence: “I’m working on a collection of memory pieces.”138 No further explanations were forthcoming at the time.

  These “memory pieces,” as she labeled them, turned out to be odds and ends of personal history, a collection of snapshots, flashbacks, and snippets, which described her life experiences and dispensed information, apparently both factual and imagined. This structure permitted her to dart in and out, offering a glimpse of an experience, not necessarily in any cradle to grave sequence. An Unfinished Woman opened with her upbringing in New Orleans, then quickly led readers through her first publishing job in New York; the dull marriage to Arthur Kober (dispatched in one sentence), which led to Hollywood and a thankless job as manuscript reader for MGM, vacations in France and Spain during the 1930s, intertwined with diary excerpts from several trips to Moscow. The centerpiece featured a trio of portraits involving three people who had meant a great deal to her: her housekeeper Helen Richardson, Dashiell Hammett, and Dottie.

  The sketch of Dottie starts generously by extolling her unforgettable wit, “so wonderful that neither age nor illness ever dried up the spring from which it came fresh each day.”139 But in practically the same paragraph she begins cutting her down to size, claiming that Dottie, like herself, was a “difficult” woman and serving up handpicked memories that focus mostly on the superficial: liquor, rich people, uncashed checks. Tucked between the anecdotes are pent-up feelings of condescension and contempt.<
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  References to Dottie’s abysmal taste in men allows her to pounce on Alan Campbell, whom she always denounced, behind Dottie’s back, as a “fairy-shit” and “pip-squeak.”140 In reality funny and good-natured, Alan is introduced as unlikable and hard to stomach before being dismissed as a dope whom Dottie herself mocks but continues to depend on. The dead Alan rates a clever but mean-spirited reference to mayonnaise, courtesy of the Campbells’ neighbor Peter Feibleman, with Lilly casting doubt on the cause of death and implying that pills were to blame. No charge of suicide was brought, she said, which was untrue since Alan’s death certificate lists him as a “probable suicide.”

  But perhaps the ultimate in disrespect was failing to give Dottie any significant place in American literature. Apart from a fleeting compliment for “Big Blonde,” there is practically nothing about her defining work, the 330-odd poems and free verses, the scores of short stories, screenplays, and song lyrics, the mountain of articles, essays, and reviews, and the three plays staged in New York and Dallas. By implication, she is not in the same league as a serious artist like Lilly. Glossing over the literary accomplishments devalues her to a wisecracking personality destined to be remembered for cute epigrams (“Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.”141).

  Toward the end of the portrait, affection abruptly falls by the wayside when Lilly suddenly confesses to having grown sick and tired of Dottie, no longer an entertaining companion but a forgetful old woman and a sloppy drunk who neglects to deposit checks in a timely manner. Only here could Lilly acknowledge her tremendous anger about Dottie’s drinking, illnesses, and embrace of a dingy life (which forced Lilly to feel pity) and especially rage that she had reneged on a promise and made a stranger her sole heir.