Chapter 10
1927-1928
Well before the spring of 1927, it was clear that something out of the ordinary was happening. Enough Rope, already in its third edition with the end not yet in sight, was making publishing history by becoming a best seller, an almost unprecedented achievement for a volume of poetry.
Suddenly, Dorothy found herself inundated with invitations to literary luncheons that were held in hotel ballrooms “filled with people who looked as if they had been scraped out of drains”—women in draped plush dresses and pince-nez and men who were “small and somewhat in need of dusting.” She quickly learned to avoid these gatherings of “literary Rotarians” by pleading “a return of that old black cholera of mine.” She had to be extremely vigilant even with friends. She was horrified to learn that Horace Liveright planned to merchandise her as “another A. A. Milne,” an author whom she found repulsive. She managed to veto the idea, but not in time to prevent Robert Benchley from going about the city saucily calling her “Dotty-the-Pooh.”
Enough Rope received impressive reviews. The Nation said that in the book’s best lyrics “the rope is caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity.” The New York Herald Tribune praised her work as “whisky straight,” an unfortunate metaphor considering her drinking problem. Poetry observed that she had in fact carved out her own niche in American literary humor with poetry that was fashionably chic, “ ‘smart’ in the fashion designer’s sense of the word.” A few disapproving reviewers couldn’t wait to slap her down on the very same grounds, calling Enough Rope flapper verse that seemed to them slangy, vulgar, and frivolous. All in all, Enough Rope could not have suited more perfectly the tastes of readers in the year 1927.
By far the most thoughtful assessment came from Edmund Wilson, who believed that even though “few poems in this book are completely successful,” the best of them were extraordinarily vivid and possessed a frankness that justified her departure from literary convention. It was incontestable that her verse gave off the essence of the Hotel Algonquin. He wrote in The New Republic that “her wit is the wit of her particular time and place.” Her writing had its roots in contemporary reality, which was precisely what he had been pleading for in poetry. Dorothy had emerged as “a distinguished and interesting poet,” he wrote, an opinion later seconded by John Farrar in The Bookman, when he called her a “giantess of American letters secure at the top of her beanstalk,” who wrote “poetry like an angel and criticism like a fiend.”
Any kind of praise made Dorothy uncomfortable. Even though she was extremely gratified by the book’s reception, she dismissed compliments and tended to downplay her new popularity. When McCall’s magazine invited her to join Edna Millay, Edward Arlington Robinson, and Elinor Wylie in contributing to a Christmas feature that would be titled “Christmas Poems by America’s Greatest Poets,” she was perfectly happy to oblige and threw together “The Gentlest Lady.” Not for an instant did she fancy herself among America’s greatest poets, if indeed the editors of McCall’s were competent to make that judgment, which she must have questioned. As she later wrote in The New Yorker, “There is poetry and there is not.” Her writing, she believed, fell into the latter group. Once Hendrik Van Loon said to her that if a reader has any doubt about a poem, then it isn’t one. Dorothy had nothing but doubts about her work. Regardless of McCall’s, she felt that her true aptitude might lie in fiction. Her intention was to give up verse and concentrate entirely on short stories, but this raised other problems. How could she quit writing poetry now? She was too famous.
Anarchism was a theory she understood naturally. During the summer of 1927, she published a poem in The New Yorker that she appropriately titled “Frustratior”:
If I had a shiny gun,
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folks who give me pains;
Or had I some poison gas,
I could make the moments pass
Bumping off a number of
People whom I do not love.
But I have no lethal weapon—
Thus does Fate our pleasure step on!
So they still are quick and well
Who should be, by rights, in hell.
Among those she hated were the powerful who had no qualms taking advantage of the weak. It was a revulsion against mistreatment of all creatures, human and animal, that dated back to her earliest days. That summer, her own past (heretofore fairly well concealed) suddenly began to interlock with disturbing current events, and she became absorbed in a political cause. Like Katherine Anne Porter and Edna St. Vincent Millay, she was drawn to this particular issue because of her conviction that a shocking miscarriage of justice was taking place. She entered the fight with the intention of stopping the execution of men she believed innocent, but by its conclusion, her experiences had thoroughly radicalized her. She would remain unalterably committed to radical principles for the rest of her life, even when it meant sacrificing her livelihood.
To a large degree, her reputation had been built on tough talk and a whiplash tongue, a style that was synonymous with taking little seriously. Not only the public but some of her closest friends wrongly concluded that her feelings could not be altogether sincere. Certainly she had indicated absolutely no interest in organized politics before 1927. Women won the vote in 1920, but not once had she taken the trouble to cast a ballot. Politicians of both parties bored or appalled her, and not until after the election of Franklin Roosevelt was she heard to speak kindly of any candidate. Little wonder that those who saw newspaper photographs of policemen bundling her off to jail were astonished.
The explanation for all this was simple: It was not the American political system that succeeded in firing her imagination, but foreign-grown philosophies that most Americans found extreme and distasteful.
Her first memories of course were of a family whose every comfort depended upon a system that was merciless about squeezing the lifeblood out of helpless people. Whether or not she ever saw the inside of a sweatshop is immaterial, because she surely absorbed the essence of the conflict between bosses like J. Henry Rothschild and the cloakmakers he employed. In 1927, she began to recover pieces of her past and apply them to the present.
Three decades of rage came roaring to the surface.
As soon as she stepped off the train at South Station two detectives pounced on her, asking if she was from New York and to state her business in Boston. Since she was decked out in creamy-white gloves, smelled of gardenias, and was obviously a gentlewoman if not an aristocrat, they let her pass.
Boston was under martial law. Across Prison Point Bridge, in Charlestown, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti waited in their death-house cells. The two Italian-American anarchists, fish peddler and shoemaker by professions, had been tried and found guilty of the murders of a paymaster and a guard in South Braintree, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1920. What had begun as an obscure, routine murder trial had developed into an international cause célèbre. Seven years of legal maneuvering—a tortured stew of motions, petitions, and reviews—had held off the electric chair until all legal remedies had been exhausted. Sacco and Vanzetti were to die at midnight.
At three o’clock, Dorothy arrived at 256 Hanover Street in the North End and climbed two dark, narrow flights of stairs. Sacco-Vanzetti defense headquarters was located in a poor Italian neighborhood where peddlers’ carts made splashes of color with big ripe peaches, plums, and pears. Rookie policemen, nice-looking youngsters who seemed self-conscious, were stationed on the sidewalk. The thermometer read in the low eighties and the shabby two-room office was stifling. On the wall a poster announced JUSTICE IS THE ISSUE!, and alongside somebody had tacked up a remark being attributed to Judge Webster Thayer: I’M GONNA GET THOSE ANARCHIST BASTARDS GOOD AND PROPER.
Heading the defense committee were Mary Donovan, formerly an industrial inspector for the Massachusetts Department of Labor, and Gardner “Pat” Jackson, a journalist who handled publicity. For both of them, Sacco and Vanzetti had become the center of their existences. On this afternoon, August tenth, discouraged beyond measure, they were almost ready to concede that the months of unrelenting letter writing and pamphleteering had been wasted. At that moment, Governor Alvan Fuller was debating at the State House on Beacon Street whether or not to grant a last-minute reprieve. Demonstrations and strikes had erupted all over the world, but in Boston the thousands of protesters that Donovan and Jackson expected to turn out were nowhere to be seen. By mid-afternoon there had rolled in only a single bus whose gaudy, red banner proclaimed SENT BY THE SACCO-VANZETTl DEFENSE COMMITTEE OF NEW YORK. Aboard were a dozen Communist Party workers.
Dorothy had changed into an embroidered dress with a matching scarf, high-heeled ankle-strap shoes, and a Hattie Carnegie cloche; her gloves were spotless and she moved in a cloud of perfume. Donovan and Jackson stared at her as if she were an apparition. They did not stare long because an hour later she found herself leading a file of demonstrators down Beacon Street. A convoy of men in shirt-sleeves and women wearing cotton house-dresses, sensible shoes, and black armbands marched behind her in a single line. Many of them carried placards. Dorothy had only her handbag, tucked properly under one arm. The marchers were mostly local Party members, among them several well-known New York writers: New Masses editor Michael Gold and Sender Garlin from The Daily Worker. The only person she knew was John Dos Passos, who explained that he was covering the execution for the Worker and who squeezed into the queue ahead of her. Soon everyone started to sing “The Internationale,” then “The Red Flag.” Dorothy mouthed the words.
Across the street, near the Shaw Memorial, a crowd rapidly collected. Four or five policemen stood there, twirling their clubs and observing the promenade with sleepy interest. Before long two police wagons tore up the street with their sirens screaming. The captain got out and ambled over.
“It’s against the law to do this,” he warned. “I’ll give you seven minutes to go away.”
Dorothy kept on walking and singing.
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
At the end of the block she turned and started back. The seven minutes passed. Nothing happened.
Arise, ye wretched of the earth!
Another long seven minutes ticked by. The number of gogglers across Beacon Street had grown to several hundred. The crowd wanted a glimpse of Dorothy Parker, who was being exotically identified as “the Greenwich Village poetess.” They stretched their necks and looked her clothing up and down while they sucked at bottles of soda pop, as if they were watching an American Legion parade. To her, the worst of it was the name-calling: “Bolsheviki!” “Guinea lover!” “New York nut!” “Red scum!” Some people addressed Dorothy by name. One man warned her the police were coming. She’d better run.
“I don’t mind being arrested,” yelled Dorothy, seething.
When finally a whistle shrieked and the police came directly at the line, the marchers broke rank and some began to run. Two policemen herded Dorothy toward a patrol wagon but she refused to get in. When the captain ordered her, she insisted on walking the three blocks to the Joy Street Station.
The police held her arms, hustling her roughly down the middle of the street. Her high heels caught on the cobblestones. When her scarf slipped to the ground, they would not stop so that she could retrieve it. As they yanked her arms, she began to curse them. Behind her followed along a dogged crowd, shouting “Hang her!” “Give her six months!” “Kill her!” At the station, she was booked and then a sour-looking matron with a gold tooth took away her cigarettes and led her to a cell.
Before long, Ruth Hale came to bail her out. Behind Ruth stood a flustered, panting Seward Collins. Sewie, never at a loss for words, said that he felt terrible because he had arrived late and missed the glory of being arrested. The sight of him angered Dorothy. There was still time, she told him. It was not too late to go back to the State House and get himself arrested.
There were reporters waiting for her outside. She responded to their questions by lobbing out the wisecracks they expected of her.
“I thought prisoners who were set free got five dollars and a suit of clothes,” she said, to loud laughter.
“Is this your first arrest, Mrs. Parker?”
It was, and she had found it disappointing. Her fingerprints had not been taken, “but they left me a few of theirs. The big stiffs!” She pushed up a sleeve to show that bruises were already forming.
The execution had convulsed Boston. Overhead she saw planes circling, as if the city anticipated a full-scale invasion by the Red Army. Every policeman and fireman was on twenty-four-hour duty; grim-faced squads patrolled public buildings. Near Prison Point Bridge, streets had been roped off, and state troopers blocked the intersections. The Charlestown prison was fortified with machine guns, tear gas, and double guards wearing bulletproof vests. Dorothy persuaded a newspaper reporter to take her into the prison and once inside found that nobody paid any attention to her. She strolled around freely looking at the machine guns and patting the noses of the troopers’ horses. In the cell blocks, prisoners were screaming, “Let them out! Let them out!”
As the evening wore on, Dorothy sat in the pressroom and observed. Dozens of telegraphers and reporters played cards and smoked, scavenging for the tiniest crumbs of news to put on the wires. The more cynical were eager-beavering ahead and filing execution pieces, as though Sacco and Vanzetti were already dead. When the warden barreled in to say he’d just heard from the governor and the execution was off, telegraph keys began to cackle madly. Five minutes later, the warden ran back—it was on—midnight, and that was final. There was a round of applause. Dorothy found a telephone and called defense headquarters. She may have been talking too loudly because she was spotted by a deputy warden who went haywire, called her an enemy spy, and threatened to have her driven out of town. Luckily for her, the man had more important things to worry about. At eleven-thirty, Warden Henry burst in again. Off again, for twelve days. That was final. Like a man whose wife has just had a baby, he passed around a box of cigars.
Meanwhile, a pair of detectives in a Ford spent the night opposite Hanover Street headquarters. A reporter who noticed them keeping watch and asked what they were doing was told that they had received a straight tip on a bomb plot. They were watching for the bombers: “Two women from New York. Ruth Hale and Dorothy Parker.”
Dorothy arrived at Municipal Court the next morning, August 11, to discover the hallway outside the courtroom jammed with yesterday’s prisoners. They were flipping through the morning papers in search of news of their arrests and singing “The Internationale.” The corridor sounded like a musical version of Potemkin, with courthouse guards breaking in periodically with a chorus of “shut ups.” Several comrades brought Dorothy papers showing photographs of herself and John Dos Passos. Not only had they made the headlines, but she was disgusted to notice that some papers had allotted them almost as much space as they had Sacco and Vanzetti.
She pleaded guilty and received a five-dollar fine for loitering and sauntering.
Several days later, Dorothy and Ruth were at the dock when Vanzetti’s sister, Luiga, arrived on the Aquitania. It was clear at once that Luiga would be worthless to the defense; she had only come, she said, to guide her brother back to the Catholic faith so that he would be prepared to meet his maker.
Dorothy remained briefly in New York, trying to persuade her friends to join the protesters. She had no trouble talking Sewie into contributing thirty-five hundred dollars, which was used to purchase full-page ads in The New York Times and other major papers. Benchley had already testified before the Lowell Committee about an indiscreet remark of Judge Thayer’s in the Worcester Golf Club locker room; later, he filed a writ of protest with the court. Heywood Broun used his World column to write movingly on behalf of the condemned men, and Ruth Hale was as deeply involved with the defense committee as Dorothy was. Don Stewart wasn’t interested and made no attempt to understand. Dorothy found the indifferent behavior of other friends extremely vexing. “Those people at the Round Table didn’t know a bloody thing. They thought we were fools to go up and demonstrate for Sacco and Vanzetti.” She supposed them ignorant because “they didn’t know and they just didn’t think about anything but the theater.” That was no excuse in her opinion.
On her return to Boston, she spent long hours at Hanover Street helping with whatever tasks needed to be done. She worked in the back room, where Gardner “Pat” Jackson was always typing at the long oak table, and soon developed a little-girl crush on the tweedily handsome Coloradan who had been a reporter on the Boston Globe. Since the opportunity for personal conversation was limited, and she was too shy to approach him directly, she dropped breathless notes full of superlatives into his lap as she left the room. Pat Jackson was, she wrote, a very great human being, precisely the kind of perfect man she had always wanted to spend her life with. “These adoring businesses,” as Jackson described the notes, were embarrassing and he did not reciprocate because, “I had my work to do.”
Plenty of visitors milled through the office. The weekend before the new execution date saw the arrival of a number of prominent writers: Susan Glaspell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary Heaton Vorse, Upton Sinclair, and Katherine Anne Porter. John Dos Passos returned. They picketed the State House, got themselves arrested, and defense headquarters promptly bailed them out at twenty-five dollars each. It had become almost a routine.
Throughout the day, the defense workers sometimes drank to steady their nerves, and each evening they tottered out to eat spicy spaghetti at one of the Italian restaurants along Hanover Street. Mother Gaboni’s, third floor back, was rated the best. Mother Gaboni, a fine cook, had two bootlegger sons and served big jugs of home-made red wine. Since red wine gave Dorothy a mighty high, she jokingly referred to it as the “Red Badge of Courage.”
The pressroom felt like an oven because all the windows had been nailed shut for fear a bomb would be thrown in. At eleven o’clock Dorothy telephoned Pat Jackson to tell him that there was a rumor, erroneous as it turned out, that the killings might be held up. As Jackson remembered it, on the night of the execution Dorothy “was able to get admitted to the prison for last words with Sacco and Vanzetti,” but this memory is confirmed by no other source. Near twelve-thirty, the Associated Press reporter who had been chosen by lot to witness the electrocutions returned to the pressroom with the details. “No features,” he announced. “Entirely colorless.” Neither man had confessed. Sacco’s last words were “Viva L’anarchia!” and somebody asked if anarchia was spelled with a k. Vanzetti shook hands with everyone, then like a gentleman thanked the warden for his many courtesies, and lastly said he forgave everyone. Correction: He forgave some people.
The insensitive remarks of the reporters seared Dorothy: “The little infant Jesus!” “Ain’t they lambs, those Reds?” Listening to them sickened her.
At Hanover Street, the telephone rang and rang, but nobody picked it up. Finally, the rooms were hushed. Dorothy sat with Jackson, Vanzetti’s friend Aldino Felicani, and a few others. None of them spoke. For a long time they sat staring at their knees. Then, Jackson hoisted himself up and said he was going for a walk. Felicani followed him.
After a while Dorothy staggered down the stairs. The empty street in the gray hour between night and morning breathed coldness. It was August 23. The day before had been her thirty-fourth birthday.
During the autumn after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, new people entered her life, and because they contrasted so strongly with what she had witnessed, she welcomed them. The ideas she had heard in Boston had struck a live nerve somewhere, and now she began proudly calling herself a socialist. “My heart and soul are with the cause of socialism,” she announced. The odd choice of company she began to keep did not reflect her politics however. Some of her new friends were bankers and Wall Street businessmen, some of them millionaires, but all of them conspicuous capitalists whose political consciousness had not been raised. Although Dorothy still had the run of the Swopes’ place and regularly visited other estates along Long Island’s North Shore, she got to know the new bunch through Benchley and Stewart: John Hay “Jock” Whitney, his sister, Joan Whitney Payson, Pierpont and Marise Morgan, and Robert and Adele Lovett.
These attractive, moneyed socialites found the circles in which they had grown up too stuffy for their tastes. Amusing writers like Dorothy and Benchley were much in demand. Their talent and gaiety were considered charming, and their company welcomed in drawing rooms and on trips. The previous spring, Jock Whitney had taken Benchley to see the Grand National in England. Stewart and Benchley liked this crowd very much. Dorothy, who tended to trust their judgment, went along with these associations, which she would later deride as products of the natural social-climbing instincts of indigent writers. Still, these friendships had undeniable advantages because the rich could be generous suppliers of cottages on their estates for little or no rent, memberships in racquet and tennis clubs, and gifts of money and stocks.
Dorothy’s closest friend in the group was Adele Quartley Brown Lovett, daughter of investment banker James Brown, wife of Robert A. Lovett (a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman & Company and secretary of Defense in the 1950s), and mother of two children. Famous for her dinner parties, Adele Lovett was a witty and elegant blond clotheshorse who cultivated the Round Table writers and made a big effort to befriend Dorothy. Dorothy gave the impression of reciprocating Adele Lovett’s esteem for several years, even dedicating a book to her, although Adele and her Brahmin manners grated on her nerves. Finally, as an indignant Lovett said herself, she “dropped us like hot potatoes.” The truth was that Dorothy tolerated her wealthy friends and even gave the appearance of enjoying their company. There was a wonderful tawdriness to be found in their drawing rooms, where she was sure to meet “over-eager portrait-painters, playwrights of dubious sexes, professional conversationalists, and society ladies not yet quite divorced.” Their stupidities were of course ideal targets for all manner of wisecracks and gossip. Dorothy appreciated the rich for their houses, cars, servants, and clothes, but, with a few exceptions, she invariably found them dull, silly, and almost totally ignorant.
About this time she met John Wiley Garrett II, an investment banker with the private banking firm of Hallgarten & Company. Garrett was the same age as Dorothy, although she sometimes described him as “a very good-looking young man indeed,” or as “a graceful young man ever carefully dropping references to his long, unfinished list of easy conquests,” so that it seemed as though he were significantly younger. He was born on December 3, 1893, in St. Louis, attended the Kent School, and graduated from Williams College in 1915. During the war, he served in France as a captain in the 103rd Field Artillery, and immediately afterward began working in Wall Street. He sailed and played golf and tennis, and he belonged to The Leash and Downtown Association and the American Legion. Politically he was about as far right as he could get, a stereotype of a reactionary Republican. (During the Depression, Edmund Wilson remembered him as someone upon whom he might base a fictional character who thought President Hoover was doing a fine job.)
Dorothy broke off with Seward Collins and fell in love with John Garrett, who looked like a romantic lover and had a voice as “intimate as the rustle of sheets.”
On October 1, she took over the “Recent Books” column in The New Yorker, under the pseudonym “Constant Reader.” Need of money was her reason for assuming the responsibility of a regular weekly assignment. She started out cautiously and the reviews were relatively benign during the early weeks. As a reviewer, she did poorly with quality books, usually slopping adjectives like “beautiful” and “exquisite” all over the page. By the end of the first month, reviewing a memoir by President Warren Harding’s mistress and the mother of his illegitimate child, Dorothy had worked herself into a properly bilious mood. An effort had been made to suppress Nan Britton’s creation because police had invaded the printing plant to seize the plates. “Lady,” Dorothy was dying to tell the author, “those weren’t policemen; they were critics of literature dressed up.”
It was the rare column that did not contain something to make readers laugh: Crude is the name of Robert Hyde’s first novel, she reported. “It is also a criticism of it.” Margot Asquith’s latest book, she chortled, has “all the depth and glitter of a worn dime,” and she went on to speculate that “the affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.” Dorothy was probably at her most pugilistic with how-to books. Confronted with a work about happiness, titled Happiness and written by a Yale professor, she described the book as
second only to a rubber duck as the ideal bathtub companion. It may be held in the hand without causing muscular fatigue or nerve strain, it may be neatly balanced back of the faucets, and it may be read through before the water has cooled. And if it slips down the drain pipe, all right, it slips down the drain pipe.
Constant Reader’s best-known review was of A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner. Milne’s whimsy had always nauseated her. When she came to the word hummy, her stomach revolted. “And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings,” she wrote, “that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.”
Almost from the outset, she set a precedent of being late with her copy, which was due at The New Yorker on Fridays. On Sunday mornings, someone from the magazine would telephone. Dorothy, reassuring, said that the column was finished except for the last paragraph and promised to have it for them within the hour. Throughout the day, the same routine would be repeated several times. Occasionally, she would claim she had just ripped up the column because it was awful. At that point, she would start writing.
She joked that her lateness was unavoidable because she had to begin a column by typing her name and address in the upper left hand corner of the paper (if it did not look perfect she would retype it sometimes as often as eleven times) and because she first had to study the typewriter keyboard to see how many words could be formed from the letters in the word Corona (fifteen if she used the dictionary). Naturally, time flitted by like a steam-roller, and the first thing she knew the morning was shot and the noon whistles were blowing. The whistles meant lunchtime for most people, but not for her because, “I have an editor. I have an overdraft at the bank. I have a pain in the eye.”
While she was unquestionably accomplished when it came to stalling, the missed deadlines at this time were due to the fact that she had undertaken more work than she could comfortably complete. In this period of fertility, when not even an attack of mumps slowed her down, she wrote some of her best stories, among them “Arrangement in Black and White,” a rather bold attack on racism that appeared in The New Yorker, and the comic but deadly serious monologue she called “A Telephone Call,” published in The Bookman. She continued to produce verse, and she also agreed to accept a second regular assignment, an editorial column for McCall’s that required her to write a chatty personal essay about New York or any subject she cared to write about each month.
She was leading a hectic social life and staying up late, drinking a lot, but handling it well. Only occasionally did she suffer from incapacitating hangovers, which she jokingly referred to as “the rams.”
Most of the time, she kept her hangovers to herself and insisted that she felt “perfectly fine,” a phrase she repeated so regularly that she finally used it as the title for a short story.
Dorothy settled into a nonsexual friendship with Seward Collins. Recently, Sewie had gone into partnership with Burton Rascoe to purchase The Bookman and now was pestering her to contribute fiction. There had been a brief, friendly interlude with Howard Dietz, the MGM publicity director who was trying to break into theater as a songwriter. Their involvement did not get publicized out of deference to Dietz’s wife Betty, but in any case it soon ended. In fact, she was sweeping all males from her life except John Garrett, with whom she had begun an affair. Although Garrett practically had a neon sign emblazoned across his forehead that blinked I DONT WANT TO GET MARRIED, Dorothy couldn’t see it. She adored “his boyishness and gaiety and sweetness.” There was no denying he was striking, very tall and slim with dark brown hair, broad shoulders, and elegant clothes. At the age of thirty-five, he had never wed. He was a flirt who enjoyed being pursued and competed for by flotillas of women, especially those who were married or divorced. He also liked nothing better than to play them off against each other. In his Murray Hill flat overlooking a garden, there was a considerable collection of cigarette cases and monogrammed dressing gowns, which had been presented to him by hopeful women.
Enamored once again with a handsome, Gentile, corporate type, wearing Roman numerals behind his name, who was in no other way remarkable, she found John Wiley Garrett II as fascinating as she once had found Edwin Pond Parker II. Although decently educated, he was a man whose interests were limited to business and sports. He shared neither her radical tendencies nor her love of literature. Later, trying to remember what they had talked about, she retained a foggy impression that he spoke about the war and about his clubs at Williams, but she couldn’t be certain because “we were both pretty fairly tight” most of the time. Alcohol transformed him into a fascinating lover, but the reality was that they had nothing in common.
In the early months of the affair, although she never mentioned John by name, she knitted the private details of their relationship into a number of columns and stories. She had a friend, she wrote in The New Yorker, “who is trying to make a lady of me, and the first step in the uphill climb has been the gaining of my promise to keep from employing certain words,” which was why she couldn’t reveal her true opinion of Sinclair Lewis’s latest novel. In the end, she coyly identified the forbidden word as rotten but only because the magazine would not print her favorite word, shit. John, incidentally, seems to have resented her position as literary critic and complained that she never wrote about anything that people read, so the next week she reviewed something he did read, the tabloid comic strips. He further complained that her drinking and late hours were a bad influence on him.
His behavior maddened her, especially his habit of breaking his promises to telephone. She would sit by the phone waiting and agonizing, resisting the impulse to phone him; when women phoned men, she wrote, “they know you are thinking about them and wanting them, and that makes them hate you.” She decided that men “hate you whenever you say anything you really think. You always have to keep playing little games.” For fear of losing him, she tried to contain her jealousy, but she continued to distrust him.
At Christmas she could not deny feeling unhappy. “Sunk I am. And in a big way. It is my conviction that civilization is about to collapse.” John’s faithlessness was scarcely news, but she had hoped to break the pattern. What surprised her was his promiscuity and his stamina for deception. He was not a bit ashamed of himself and took few precautions to conceal his exploits, which Dorothy rightfully interpreted as provocative behavior. One evening Heywood Broun and Rebecca Bernstien, who were to dine with them, plowed up the stairs to Garrett’s apartment only to find themselves with front-row seats to a confrontational scene between John, Dorothy, and a musical-comedy actress. “It was a screaming match,” Bernstien remembered, “except that it was Dorothy who was doing all the screaming. I can’t remember the exact obscenities she used but she was very, very graphic.”
“Let us leave,” Broun whispered. They shut the door and crept away.
The winter of 1928, after a four-year separation, she finally filed for divorce from Eddie. To avoid publicity, she slipped into Hartford and, before a committee of the Superior Court, testified at a private hearing in which she cited several unpleasant episodes from her married life. The committee recommended that she be granted a divorce on the ground of intolerable cruelty. Eddie declined to contest. They did not see one another on the day of the hearing, nor did they ever meet again.
Several months after the divorce, Eddie married Anne O’Brien, a probation officer employed by the Hartford Juvenile Court. They moved to the small town of Haddam, Connecticut.
Five years later, on January 7, 1933, Eddie died of Ipral (a barbituric acid derivative) poisoning. The medical examiner gave the cause of death as a self-administered overdose of a sleeping powder but concluded it was accidental. A different cause was cited by Eddie’s physician, who attributed the death to “an acute septic condition resulting from surgical procedure.” His patient, he said, recently had several teeth extracted. Eddie fell into a coma and was taken to St. Francis Hospital, where he died two days later without regaining consciousness. He was thirty-nine. His obituary noted that he had once been a stock trader with Paine Webber but mentioned no recent employment. The Hartford Courant emphasized two facts about the deceased. One was his distinguished ancestry as a grandson of the Reverend Dr. Edwin Pond Parker, pastor of the South Congregational Church and friend of Mark Twain. The other was his first marriage to Dorothy Parker, the “well-known poet.”
On the day the divorce became final, Dorothy spent the evening with John Garrett at Jack and Charlie’s speakeasy, where later they were joined by Heywood Broun and writer Mildred Gilman, at that time Broun’s secretary and assistant. Gilman recalls that Dorothy went to pieces.
Even though she hadn’t seen Eddie Parker for years, and never said a good word about him, this was a terrible time for her. She carried on and kept running off to the ladies room to cry, and the men kept sending me after her because she had this tendency toward committing suicide, and she also had a habit of giving all her money to the ladies-room attendant. After this happened three or four times, I was getting bored stiff. Finally, John rose in all his Wall Street finery and announced emphatically that hehad to go to the gentleman’s room, to which Dorothy muttered, “He really has to use the telephone but he doesn’t want to admit it.”
That spring she tried to temper her drinking with highballs that were just little ones, “awfully weak; just cambric Scotch,” and talked about needing more dogs. May marked the publication of Sunset Gun, her second volume of verse. Boni and Liveright did a hefty first printing of ten thousand copies, along with a fancy numbered and autographed special edition of 250 copies that was priced at $7.50. Dorothy switched titles at the last moment from the rather cheerful Songs for the Nearest Harmonica to the darker Sunset Gun,a reference to the cannon that is traditionally fired at the end of the day when the flag is lowered. Reviews were, if anything, even more enthusiastic than for Enough Rope. In the Saturday Review, Bill Benét repeated the question some people were asking: “Is it as good as Enough Rope?” Benét emphatically believed it was and went on to call Sunset Gun “a moth-gray cloak of demureness hiding spangled ribaldry, a razor-keen intellect mocking a head dark with desperation.” As for its author, “Long may she wave!”
In Sunset Gun Dorothy included a concise poem written for The New Yorker before she met John Garrett, which she called “Three-Volume Novel,” although in the collection she downgraded it to “Two-Volume Novel”:
The sun’s gone dim, and
The moon’s turned black;
For I loved him, and
He didn’t love back.
She dedicated Sunset Gun to John, but the situation remained as unsatisfactory as ever. She was not prepared to send him packing, nor could she accept him as he was. Her emotional dependence on him was contrasted by the autonomy she exhibited in other areas of her life. She left the Algonquin, where Round Table lunches had become less frequent, and moved into a furnished flat on East Fifty-fourth Street, off Fifth Avenue, two flights above a piano store. She paid seventy-five dollars a month for a living room, a tiny bedroom, and a kitchenette with all the usual useless conveniences. Only the ice box interested her, because the White Rock needed to be chilled.
Dorothy’s nightly cocktail parties took place as always at her new apartment. One evening, when a large crowd had assembled, Mildred Gilman happened to enter Dorothy’s bedroom to get to the bathroom at about the same time as Robert Benchley went in to make a telephone call. Dorothy noticed and later saw them coming out of the bedroom together. Jumping to conclusions and furious at Mildred, whom she supposed to have lured Benchley into the room, she waited until Mildred had left before informing Heywood Broun that his secretary was a slut. When this got back to Gilman, a divorcee with a small son, she was so upset that she asked Benchley to tell Heywood the truth. She also wondered why Dorothy would have fabricated such a mean story. Benchley, too, found it baffling.
She is quite given to telling of assaults on John by various ladies (I have never heard you included in the list, but have heard only part of the list) but this [is] the first time that I have ever been made the hero. It sounds like one of Dottie’s vivid word-pictures to illustrate my helplessness in the clutches of any attractive woman.... Incidentally, you don’t suppose for one minute that, if I had any reason to believe that you had designs on my person, you would have left that room inviolate, do you?
Allen Saalburg remembered Dorothy as “half-soused a good deal of the time, and that’s when her worst qualities came out.” A certain amount of the respect she commanded was rooted in “very strong fear. People were afraid of being jumped on from behind.”
Dorothy had experienced abdominal pain in the winter and wondered if she might have appendicitis, but the discomfort was slight. Instead of reporting it to Dr. Barach, she bought a book about appendicitis and self-diagnosed the symptoms as a fancy hangover, “just the effects of that new Scotch of mine which, friends tell me, must have been specially made by the Borgias.” One Monday afternoon toward the end of May, she suddenly developed severe pain and began running a temperature. This time she did send for Barach, who diagnosed acute appendicitis and sent her to Presbyterian Hospital, where she was operated on the same evening.
When Aleck Woollcott came to visit,
I found her hard at work. Because of posterity and her creditors, I was loath to intrude, but she, being entranced at any interruption, greeted me from her cot of pain, waved me to a chair, offered me a cigarette, and rang a bell. I wondered if this could possibly be for drinks. “No,” she said sadly, “it is supposed to fetch the night nurse, so I ring it whenever I want an hour of uninterrupted privacy.”
She gave her address as Bedpan Alley and requested a typewriter, insisting that the size of the hospital bill made it necessary for her to write her way out of the place. Ignoring the fact that she had two best-selling books in print—and loath to shell out the fruits of her success to Presbyterian Hospital—she tried to think of someone who might want to underwrite an extravagance like an appendectomy. Bea Stewart assumed the hospital expenses would not be a problem, since they had rich friends who would be pleased to help out.
“No rich people,” Dorothy cautioned. Dorothy never took money from people she disliked.
Dorothy agreed that John Gilbert would be the logical candidate to approach. Although he earned ten thousand dollars a week in Hollywood, he did not qualify as “rich people” by her definition. Gilbert responded to Bea’s telegram by promptly wiring the money, which she asked the telegraph office to pay out in one-dollar bills. Stuffing the cash into a paper bag, she marched into Dorothy’s room and tore open the bag to let the green leaves blow around like a hurricane in a cabbage patch. The nurses failed to find this amusing.
“Is this insanity?” one of them asked sourly and stalked out.
“It’s a form of it,” Bea replied.
After three weeks at Presbyterian, Dorothy faced a month’s convalescence at home. She was miserably bored. Before long she was wishing that she owned an electric train. “Hell, while I’m up, I wish I had a couple of professional hockey teams.” To kill time she read fiction, which reminded her of her own failures in that genre. Despite everything, her ambition still was to write a novel. Real writers, in her eyes, seldom limited themselves to short fiction. More than ever, she felt a need to prove herself a real writer. Short-story collections never sold well because literature was measured by the yard and people wanted their money’s worth. She began to work on a story that would not be quite long enough to qualify as a novella, but was two or three times the length of anything she had attempted so far. It was possibly the finest story she ever wrote. To read it is to envisage her laying down a sentence, laboriously shaping it until it seemed simple, then going on to the next sentence and doing likewise, so carefully crafted is this story.
It can be described as a parable of a woman who loses her way, condemned to live and wander. Hazel Morse is a wholesale dress model, good sport, wife, ex-wife, swell drinker, animal lover, unsuccessful suicide, and big blonde. The story readily suggests Dorothy and presents a fictionalized account of some bad things that had happened to her. “Big Blonde” is perhaps the most intensely autobiographical of all her fiction. Certainly, it was no accident that she opens the story in the garment industry, where Hazel has been employed as a model for many years and where she has perfected her good-sport role with dress buyers from Des Moines and Houston. Like her heroine, Dorothy had her own origins in the garment business; although Seventh Avenue was a world she despised, it was as familiar to her as breathing.
After tinkering with the story off and on for the rest of the year, she allowed Seward Collins to publish it in The Bookman as a favor, because she might have placed it in a more distinguished magazine. When “Big Blonde” appeared in February 1929, it brought her unanimous praise. F.P.A.’s reaction in The Conning Tower typified the enthusiasm:
... So had a beaker of milk with O. Hering the architect, and so home and read a tayle of Dorothy Parker’s in the February Bookman, called “Big Blonde,” the best short story I have read in so long a time that I cannot say. I would nominate that lady for a membership in the Dudless Writers’ Club, a sacred society, whose only other member I can think of at this moment is A. E. Housman.
Her friends, naturally, loved “Big Blonde.” So did a great many others, however. The prestigious O. Henry competition selected it as the best short story of 1929.
The publication of “Big Blonde” marked a leap forward in her literary reputation. It also sealed the end of her relationship with Collins, who, in due course, committed professional suicide. He and his literary magazine continued to win respect for another two or three years before taking a nose dive when he began publishing political ideas that seemed to parallel Mussolini’s. It was whispered that he had become a fascist. In addition to his admiration for the Nazis, his fascination with psychic research and his claims to be receiving messages from other worlds did not reassure people either. In 1952, Edmund Wilson informed her that Sewie had died.
“I don’t see what else he could do,” she said, as if he had killed himself. In her eyes he had, long ago.
Technological progress, aside from the Lindbergh flight, left Dorothy cold. She never learned to drive and refused to purchase a radio, obstinately declaring “there is no force great enough to make me,” and she found movies boring. A motion picture theater was “an enlarged and magnificently decorated lethal chamber to me.” All the same, she began to revise some of those judgments slightly when Benchley filmed The Treasurer’s Report for the William Fox Studio and a few months later acted in a second short, The Sex Life of the Polyp, which were the first films to use sustained talking for more than a minute. Dorothy thought he was magnificent. She also enjoyed watching a filmed conversation with George Bernard Shaw, but the ear-splitting sound tracks of other talkies made her feel like shouting at the screen, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, shut up!”
Three months later, she was sitting in a Culver City office building, staring at palm trees. Later, she said need of money lured her to Hollywood. Not only did the deal seem too good to pass up, but film writing also looked like easy money. She remembered thinking, “Why, I could do that with one hand tied behind me and the other on Irving Thalberg’s pulse.” Thanks partly to Howard Dietz, MGM offered her a contract paying three hundred dollars a week for three months, which added up to a tidy little sum. The disturbing part of the deal was living three thousand miles from New York. Still, the film company wooed her with excessive flattery, praising her wit and talent and telling her how much they needed clever writers like herself. A telegram arrived from John Gilbert: I HEAR SWELL NEWS ABOUT YOUR HAVING GONE MOVIE THAT’S GRAND WHEN ARE YOU ARRIVING.
Before she left for California, she gave an interview to the Brooklyn Eagle in which she excused her defection. “It always takes more to live on than what you earn,” she said, adding that she was “always hampered by money.” She also stated that she abhorred movies, hoped the entire film industry would collapse, and predicted she would hate Hollywood because it was full of palms, which “are the ugliest vegetable God created.” After a week in Hollywood she realized that she really did hate the place, but by then it was too late.
Her first assignment was writing dialogue for a melodrama, Madame X. The job got off to a bad start when she glimpsed an MGM publicity release that referred to her as “the internationally known author of Too Much Rope, the popular novel.” She was further dismayed to meet Irving Thalberg, production head of MGM, and realize that he had no idea who she was or why she had been hired.
“Now let’s see,” he said to her. “What was it you wanted to do for us?”
Her office was located at the end of a hall. “It was a lovely office but the air was oppressive, and even though I opened the windows and opened the doors, it was still depressing.” Her desk had the unmistakable fragrance of an outhouse. After days of sniffing and holding her nose, she learned why. The previous occupant had been growing mushrooms in a bottom drawer by a correspondence course with liquid manure guaranteed to produce mushrooms in any climate on earth. Other writers seemed reluctant to visit her cubicle. She felt isolated. When a sign painter arrived to letter her name on the door, she felt like bribing him to print GENTLEMEN instead.
Everything she had heard about Hollywood turned out to be true. Living was ridiculously expensive. At first she stayed at the Ambassador Hotel in a ten-dollar room that she thought was worth three. After she received her first paycheck and could afford to move, she lived with screenwriter Arthur Caesar and his wife, who had a big house in Beverly Hills. The parties she attended were pompous affairs, full of old fogies who had to be in bed by ten-thirty. A newspaper reported that at one gathering, she let off steam by yelling, “Come on, you so-and-sos, get a little action on this.” California weather made her sleepy, the brilliant flowers smelled like rotten, old dollar bills, and she suspected the enormous vegetables had been grown in dirty trunks. On Thanksgiving Day, when it was too hot to wear a coat, she wished she were at home where it was cold and a turkey sat in the oven at her sister’s house.
She hoped that three months in Hollywood might cure her obsession with John Garrett, the curious sensation she had of honestly not knowing “where John leaves off and I begin.” Separation from her had not changed him. When she telephoned, he sometimes pretended they had a poor connection or claimed he couldn’t talk on account of having visitors. Nothing had changed.
There was no lack of friends with whom she could commiserate in Hollywood. Gerald Murphy was there with Sara and the children. Murphy, an expert on Early American spirituals, had been recruited by MGM as a music consultant to King Vidor on the all-black picture Hallelujah. The Murphys agreed that the town was unappealing, and so did Bunny Wilson, who was living in a beach cottage in Santa Barbara and writing a novel. In early December, when Benchley arrived to act in three Fox pictures, he also found that he hated Hollywood. They turned into marathon complainers. On December 17, Dorothy was shattered to learn that Elinor Wylie had died the previous evening of a stroke; even Benchley’s presence could not dent her grief. “Dottie is so low that she hardly speaks even to me,” he reported to Gertrude.
Two months passed. Through no fault of her own, she had not written a single word for Madame X because nobody instructed her what to write. Instead, she wrote dialogue for an untitled film (whose plot remained a secret too). When she had finished, she sent it to Irving Thalberg for approval. Eventually, the pages came back with a message from his secretary: “Mr. Thalberg said to tell you that you have to be careful in writing for the pictures. You always have to think of the Little Totties.” Dorothy was ready to explode.
“God,” she moaned, “and how I hate children!”
Given her frustration, it is not clear why she signed two more contracts in early January committing herself to work on Five O’Clock Girl and the Cecil B. DeMille film Dynamite.
For Dynamite, she was asked to write a song, even though the picture was not a musical. Since the success of The Jazz Singer, producers were insisting that even nonmusicals use a song for exploitation purposes. To Dorothy’s mind, the theme-song craze had got out of hand with such foolishness as “Varsity Girl, I’ll Cling to You,” for Varsity Girl, but she was determined to give MGM what she imagined might please, and she concocted a snappy lyric entitled, “Dynamite Man, I Love You,” which was swiftly pronounced unacceptable. At her wit’s end to know what they wanted, she made up her mind to ask DeMille himself what the picture was about, although getting in to see him was “like riding a camel through the eye of a needle.”
“Mr. DeMille, just tell me what this picture is about,” she croaked, fearful lest she waste a second of the producer’s precious time.
DeMille treated her to a lengthy saga about a socialite who, in order to gain an inheritance, needs a husband and makes up her mind to marry a man who has been accused and convicted of a murder, unjustly of course, and is awaiting the end in a prison cell, with time hanging heavy on his hands and nothing for solace but his guitar, not knowing a last-minute reprieve awaits him, the whole sorry goulash wanting nothing more than a catchy tune for the poor devil to sing. By the time he got to the end, Dorothy’s eyes had rolled upward and backward into her head.
“Mr. DeMille, the details of these pictures must be ... my goodness, it’s just staggering.”
DeMille said, “Ah, yes, zebras in The King of Kings. ”
In her office, she began flipping through a Bible to find out why zebras should be in a film about the life of Christ. She wondered if she had heard wrong. Perhaps DeMille had said Hebrews.
Next time she saw DeMille, she said, “Mr. DeMille, what were you doing with zebras?”
He said, “Oh, the zebras. They were pulling the chariots of Mary Magdalene.” He paused. “Terrible, they kick so easily but their legs broke.”
“Of course,” Dorothy said. “I should have known that,” and tottered back to her office where she quickly wrote, with composer Jack King, a lovely ballad, “How Am I to Know?” When it was accepted, she informed Thalberg that she was going home. She demanded, and received, train fare back to New York. So eager was she to make her getaway that she left the home of Arthur Caesar without saying good-bye.
Back in New York, she allowed herself to be swept away by the enthusiasm of two men who had founded The Viking Press, Harold Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer, long-time admirers who convinced her that it would be a crime if she didn’t write a novel. Guinzburg was the type of intellectual whom Dorothy could respect, a sensitive, rather scholarly man who was exceptionally solid in his knowledge of literature. In contrast, “Georgie Opp” was extroverted—a snappy dresser, a bit of a smart aleck, a man who took pride in knowing everybody worth knowing and in cultivating those he didn’t. He loved women (as friends) and set about forthwith fawning over Dorothy, flattering her shamelessly. The upshot was that she agreed to produce a novel in time to head Viking’s spring 1930 list, an astonishing promise for someone who spent three or four months on a short story, but she was counting on it being possible if she went abroad again.
There seemed to be nothing holding her in New York, because her affair with John was over. She had a romantic’s view of broken love affairs. When an interviewer once asked if she thought it silly to kill oneself over unrequited love, she opened her eyes wide. “No,” she said. She took the same approach to the writing of novels. The solution for both was foreign travel.
When she learned that Muriel and Allen Saalburg were planning to sail in April, she made up her mind to go over with them.