Chapter 11
1929-1932
During a brief stay in London, she bought a pugilistic, prizewinning Dandie Dinmont terrier named Timothy, who was fourteen months old and would have been the sweetest dog in the world if not for his habit of picking fights with almost every animal that crossed his path. Dorothy took Timothy to Paris, where she had not been at the Hotel Napoléon more than a few days before she began to feel sick.
Luckily, the Saalburgs knew of a physician, as it happened one of France’s most eminent surgeons, and they offered to accompany her to the examination. Afterward, the doctor came out to the reception room and gestured broadly to them with both arms to indicate the enlargement of the patient’s liver. Dorothy blamed the language difference for her difficulty in understanding the diagnosis and would mysteriously refer to her condition as “a dainty complaint—something the matter with my liver.” For six weeks she felt “sick and blue and lonely.” Work was out of the question, and drinking was strictly forbidden. Confined to her hotel room with only the Dandie Dinmont for company, she had visits from the Saalburgs and also a sick call from Ernest and Pauline Hemingway, who were living with their infant son near the Church of Saint-Sulpice and who were, she said, “something swell to me,” although later she admitted disliking Pauline.
When she began to feel better, she went on a shopping spree and bought a summer fur coat made of cream-colored unborn lamb, which had “all the warmth and durability of a sheet of toilet paper.” She also ordered a number of trailing chiffon dresses and stocked up on nightgowns, chemises, and slips with matching panties for herself as well as her sister. Afterward, looking at her purchases, she realized they were “some of the most ill-advised clothes ever assembled. They were just what somebody with an afflicted liver would have picked out.” Her most costly mistake proved to be the summer fur, which she would wear only four times before shipping it home to Helen, who had little use for it either.
At the end of June, Benchley arrived with his wife and children. Against her better judgment, Dorothy agreed to join them in a rented car on a grueling four-day journey to Antibes, where they planned to visit the Murphys. Around Gertrude, Benchley seemed strangely silent. “He simply can’t speak, in the presence of his bride, and who could? O my God, what a woman, oh, my God, what a woman!” She found it hard to believe he was the same man, so subdued was his behavior around his family. Before long, Nat and young Bub were driving her crazy. When Robert Junior had been a baby, Dorothy had been quite taken with his chubbiness and fondly nicknamed him Annie, because he reminded her of the Irish maid once employed by the Rothschilds. “Annie,” his baby fat gone, had matured into a normal, high-spirited ten-year-old who bickered and competed with his older brother. According to Benchley’s diary, crisis followed crisis: Dorothy left her passport in a restaurant, Timothy barked at every dog along the roadside, young Bub “gets in nettles making p.p.” The children’s rowdiness forced Benchley to offer a prize “to first boy not to be amusing.”
Gertrude regarded travel for children as an opportunity for education. Assuming the role of teacher and tour guide, she pointed out Roman ruins and conducted spelling contests. At one point, almost unhinged by the racket, Dorothy told Gertrude that she was considering surgery to reduce the size of her breasts. What prompted her to cook up such a peculiar confidence would be interesting to know. On the other hand, as she wrote to Aleck Woollcott, “I have a collection of Mrs. Benchleiana that will knock your justly prize right eye out.”
At Villa America, Sara and Gerald installed the Benchley family in one of their guest houses and put Dorothy and Timothy in the other, the bastide, which resembled a picture-book Normandy farmhouse with plumbing and electricity and exquisite decorations. It stood surrounded by fig trees laden with purple fruit, which was fine, she said, “except that I hate figs in any form.” The weather was glorious and suddenly Dorothy felt fired with “deferred health and twilit energy.” She began swimming two kilometers a day; she devoured the accounts of murders and dismemberings in the Nice papers; and she played with the Murphy children—eleven-year-old Honoria, eight-year-old Patrick, who had a stomach ailment requiring a special diet, and ten-year-old Baoth, who named a chicken after her. When the chicken turned out to be a rooster, Baoth shrugged philosophically and said, “What is that of difference?” Dorothy’s hair grew long and she began to gain weight.
From Antibes, Dorothy sent The New Yorker three poems and two short stories. She was barreling ahead on her novel, to which she had given the intriguing title Sonnets in Suicide, or the Life of John Knox. Numerous pages got torn up, and what was left failed to please her entirely but, she said, “it’s an awful pile of work, just the same.” Daily she prayed, “Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman. For Jesus Christ’s sake, amen.”
Among the old friends she saw were the Fitzgeralds, who had rented a villa near Cannes. Zelda, who seemed tired and more remote than usual, was gravitating toward her ultimate breakdown, but Dorothy was unaware of her problems. It was Scott, jittery, argumentative, and often obnoxiously drunk, who seemed to be in poor shape. Jealous of the hospitality that Sara and Gerald were lavishing on Dorothy, he wrote petulantly to Hemingway that the Murphys were putting on their most elaborate performance for her benefit but she didn’t seem to appreciate it.
At Villa America she was content to live quietly. Everyone told her that the Riviera social scene that summer was terrible because every “tripe” was there, including Rosie Dolly and Peggy Hopkins Joyce. Still, she never knew who might turn up. Adele Lovett came over for four days, just to see Benchley she claimed, but left in disgust because he was tied up with his family every minute. Jack Gilbert and Ina Claire arrived on their honeymoon. Benchley, walking along the street in Cannes, came face to face with his former mistress, who was in the company of her current boyfriend, and she cut him dead. That evening, shaken by the encounter, he managed to give Gertrude the slip, and he and Dorothy sallied forth to get “absolutely blotto.”
Dorothy had dutifully cut back on her drinking, but that night she got so drunk that she wound up in bed with a good-looking international polo star, the heir to a carpeting fortune. “The lucky man was Laddie Sanford,” she wrote Helen, “and we wouldn’t know each other even if we ever did see each other again. And I don’t even feel embarrassed about it, because I can’t tell you how little sex means to me now. Or at least I can’t tell you how little I think sex means to me now. And polo players wouldn’t count, anyway.”
Unfortunately, the drunken encounter with Sanford triggered her memories of John Garrett. Before leaving New York, despite her suspicion that he was involved with at least two other women, she felt pleased when he told her that he too would be in France that summer. She must cable her address so they might rendezvous somewhere for a week or two, he insisted. Although she read of his arrival in the Paris Herald, she failed to hear from him and finally wired to say she wished they could be friends. He responded with a collect telegram: DELIGHTED WIRE ALWAYS, three words whose studied ambiguity seemed downright spooky to her.
Knowing that he was close by and ignoring her shattered her earlier contentment. Sometimes Yvonne Roussel, tutor to the Murphy children, would catch sight of Dorothy in the garden “looking a little lost.” Suddenly she felt bewildered and miserable. “I don’t know how much I have built up for myself of his boyishness and gaiety and sweetness—even of his good looks. I honestly can’t remember what it was like to be alone with him; I couldn’t possibly recall any of our conversation.” She was mourning the loss of a fantasy, but a part of her enjoyed the unhappiness of her position, for she believed that a broken heart was no disgrace; indeed it was rather romantic.
In early August she checked her funds and was disagreeably surprised to discover she had only forty dollars left. She knew that Harold Guinzburg was in Paris with his wife, Alice, and she lost no time in speeding back there to discuss a further advance. To prove to Guinzburg how conscientious she had been, she brought along as much of the typed manuscript of Sonnets in Suicide as she had completed to date. Even though it was a stupendous stack of work, the partial manuscript began to look puny to Dorothy at the last moment, so that she decided to fatten it up by inserting carbons of old articles and letters from friends.
Dorothy was incapable of asking anyone for money. Pride would not allow her to beg. What she would do instead was to look woebegone, wring her hands, and confess that she simply had no idea what she was going to do because she was broke and feeling scared about it. What usually happened was that the offer of a loan would be forthcoming, which she could then be prevailed upon to accept. On this occasion, she managed to convey her predicament to Guinzburg, who sympathetically doled out an amount sufficient for her to remain in France and finish the book. Afterward, alone in the Paris flat loaned to her by the Saalburgs, a good dingy hovel she called it, she plunged into depression. She found herself “looking thoughtfully at the Seine,” although prior to that time she had never seriously considered suicide by drowning. In this agitated frame of mind, she began to torment herself and indulged in a bit of typical pathology—she made the mistake of sending Garrett a pleading letter that confessed her longing to see him and concluded by asking what she should do, as if she expected him to offer helpful advice.
His reply, another collect cable, could not have been more insulting: LOVED LETTER DEAR SO HAPPY YOU ARE WELL.
Young Patrick Murphy was gravely ill. In Dorothy’s absence, Villa America had been transformed from a paradisiacal retreat to a house of anxiety and horror when his affliction was diagnosed as tuberculosis. Later, the Murphys’ doctors traced the incubation of the disease back to February, when the family was living in Hollywood and employing a chauffeur who subsequently proved to be tubercular. Sara and Gerald were determined that their son must be cured, even though no known cure for tuberculosis existed at that time, only methods of prolonging the patient’s life by cold mountain air and a rich dairy diet. Just as they had poured their energies into creating a magical life for themselves, they began to rechannel that same passion for living well into a counterattack on a fatal illness. At once, they dismantled Villa America in preparation for moving their whole establishment—children, servants, and pets—to Montana-Vermala, a health resort for tuberculosis patients near Sierre in the Swiss Alps.
Dorothy prepared to return home, although she dreaded living in New York, where she seemed to do nothing but drink and entertain “horrible” people in the afternoons. During the weeks before the Murphys left, she traveled to Paris to interview Ernest Hemingway for a New Yorker profile. A Farewell to Arms had just been published to superlative reviews and had jumped to the top of the best-seller list. To her disgust, the restrictions he put on her made a decent story practically impossible. He would not permit her to mention his family in Oak Park, his divorce from Hadley, “or anything he ever did or said,” she later complained. In trying to respect his wishes, she was reduced to filling the space with compliments about his writing, but the gushy, fan-magazine tone of “The Artist’s Reward” was less her fault than Hemingway’s.
Her departure plans were suddenly revised when Sara and Gerald asked her to accompany them to Montana-Vermala, as a favor, because Sara found her a comfort to have around. Dorothy immediately cabled Benchley for advice, but “the big shit” was away or never answered or both, she said, “so I came anyhow.” That is what she guessed Benchley would have done. Staying was not in her best interests; in fact, it was probably the worst decision she could have made. The first project of hers to be abandoned was Sonnets in Suicide, even though she cabled Viking to assure Guinzburg that she was WORKING HARD, as if saying it would somehow make it true. He answered that he expected Sonnets to be a best seller and to mail the manuscript special delivery when it was completed and also include an autobiographical blurb for the dust jacket.
By the third week of October, the Murphys had vacated Villa America. Only Dorothy remained to gather up Timothy and the four Murphy dogs, plus the rest of the baggage, which consisted of eleven trunks and seventeen hand pieces, and follow along behind. Shepherding the baggage caravan entailed three changes of trains and the greasing of several palms to pass the animals through customs at Geneva, but otherwise she accomplished the trip without incident. She had always considered Switzerland “the home of horseshit,” she wrote Benchley, and saw no reason to revise her opinion. Montana-Vermala was built on the side of a “God damn Alp,” from which she had no idea how she would descend; before she risked her life a second time on the funicular, she would prefer to remain among the bacilli.
The Swiss Family Murphy, as she had dubbed them, were installed in a row of six rooms at the Palace Hotel (all the sanatoriums were called Splendide or Royale) and Dorothy’s room was located on the floor above. Standing on her terrace, staring at the peaks, she remembered how strongly she had always hated mountains. She overheard a woman in the next room dying audibly one night. Day or night, she froze because there was no way to keep warm. Indoor temperatures had to be maintained at practically subarctic levels for the patients. Dorothy’s pretty Parisian clothes remained in her trunk while she bundled up in tweed suit, overcoat, and woolen muffler. Out of doors, where it was warm in the sun, she removed either the coat or the mummer
Dorothy tried not to think about Harold Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer. When she received a panicky telegram from them saying that the spring catalogue was closing December 15 and they had to know immediately if Sonnets in Suicide would be ready, she did not reply.
Once the children were in bed at nights, Dorothy joined Sara and Gerald in their room, where Gerald had arranged a makeshift bar and would ceremoniously put out a bottle of wine, a bag of cinnamon, some lemons, and a spirit lamp. Huddled in their mufflers and talking in whispers because Patrick’s room was next door, they drank the wine out of hospital tumblers and spoke of past good times and absent friends, especially Benchley. “Ah, old Boogies Benchley,” Gerald sighed. “Ah, old imaginary good lucks. Let’s cable the old fool to come over.” On Sara’s birthday they celebrated with cake and champagne and presents for everybody, including dogs, canaries, and Coquette, the parrot Dorothy bought for the children, which turned out to be a vicious creature. Afterward Dorothy went back to her room and cried.
On alternating days, Patrick received pneumothorax treatments, a procedure in which a hollow needle was inserted through his ribs into the pleura and gas pumped through it to make the lung collapse, so that if one lung was isolated perhaps the other could be saved. The thought of it made Dorothy shudder. “Christ, think of all the shits in the world and then this happens to the Murphys!”
Apart from one or two glasses of wine at bedtime, amounts that scarcely counted as drinking in her opinion, Dorothy tried to stay on the wagon. Hard liquor was not recommended at those altitudes, but some days she didn’t care; getting drunk was a necessity. One of those days she frightened Patrick and Honoria when she narrowly missed killing their canary. She offered to help Honoria clean the bird’s cage, but her hands were so unsteady that she dropped it.
Liquor, she found, did little to lighten her somber mood, which she described to Benchley as like having the “slow, even heebs.” At times she caught herself examining a clean white towel that the hospital had thumb-tacked above the washstand. “It’s a good thing to look at. You can go all around the edges very slowly, and then you can do a lot of counting the squares made by the ironed-out creases.” She felt bushed—her favorite word for exhausted—without having done anything at all, and she also felt curiously cut off from the world at the foot of the mountain. The Wall Street crash, for example, might have taken place on another planet. Since she owned no stocks, the trouble in the market had no effect on her finances, which suffered from major depressions year in, year out, but she wrote anxiously to friends asking if anyone they knew had been wiped out.
On Thanksgiving Day the Palace Hotel served veal for lunch, not unusual because nine meals out of ten featured veal. Afterward, Dorothy wrote a homesick, eleven-page letter to her sister saying how much she missed “youse guys.” Christmas proved more cheerful because company arrived: John Dos Passos and his bride, Katy, Ernest and Pauline Hemingway, and Pauline’s sister, Virginia Pfeiffer. They celebrated an all-American Christmas with a tree and a goose that Ernest had shot especially for their dinner. The bird was roasted in the hospital kitchen and served with mashed chestnuts and a flaming brandied pudding decorated with holly. The guests were eager to spend their days on the ski slopes, where Hemingway taught Honoria and Baoth how to herringbone and sidestep. Dorothy, who viewed a ski slope with the same enthusiasm as she did an electric chair, declined to accompany them.
In the evenings, Dos Passos recalled, Dorothy made “her usual funny cracks with her eyes full of tears,” and he described them eating cheese fondue and drinking the local white wine while laughing their heads off, which suggests that the merriment was a bit forced. For five or six days the Christmas visitors brought a respite of sorts, but after they departed the little group was alone again, and Dorothy began to bombard Benchley with cables and letters. She wrote,
SEE BY PARIS HERALD HOOVER SAYS NO NEED OF PESSIMISM EVERYONE HERE GREATLY ENCOURAGED STOP LOVE AND HOW ARE YOU.
YOU COME RIGHT OVER HERE AND EXPLAIN WHY THEY ARE HAVING ANOTHER YEAR.
And the plain truth:
DEEPLY SUNK LOVE YOU SOMETHING TERRIBLE.
The atmosphere of death in Montana-Vermala was inescapable. She dreaded going out for a walk and dreaded meeting people who stopped to admire Timothy. Some of them told her that they had a Dandie Dinmont at home, but of course they would never see home again. No doubt the Murphys sensed her mood, because when she talked about going home for a while, they made no attempt to dissuade her. She decided to spend a month in New York to take care of business and collect her five-hundred-dollar O. Henry prize for “Big Blonde” before rejoining Sara and Gerald. Mid-January 1930, she and Timothy braved the terrifying funicular descent down the mountainside on the first leg of their journey home.
When the De Grasse docked at the end of January, Benchley was on hand to welcome her. A crowd of newspaper reporters trailed them back to the New Weston Hotel, where they jammed themselves into Dorothy’s suite and began asking questions that immediately irritated her. She felt far from comical, but they expected to be entertained. Curled up on the sofa, with Timothy blinking soberly next to her, she insisted that she was not a wit but “only a hardworking woman, who writes for a living and hates writing more than anything else in the world.” She intended to stay a month, she said, before returning to Switzerland to finish a novel whose subject she did not care to reveal. She tried changing the subject to the economic situation and wondered whether people were nicer now that they were poorer, but the press seemed uninterested in serious subjects. When somebody asked what she thought of the New York skyline, she’d had enough of dumb questions and snapped, “Put a little more gin in mine!” as she shooed them out.
A few days later, Sara Murphy’s sister threw a welcome-home party for Dorothy. The chief topic of conversation was of course the illness of Patrick Murphy. Archibald MacLeish, meeting her for the first time, reported to Ernest Hemingway that her reputation for being affectionate with her right hand and murdering people with her left had always made him fear her. When she began to talk about the Murphys, “she took me in about eight minutes. She may be serving me up cold at this minute for all I know but I doubt it and if she is it doesn’t matter.”
After the months in Montana-Vermala, she had to reaccustom herself to the quick pace of Manhattan life. While she was away, her friends had been busy: Don Stewart wrote a successful comedy that opened on Broadway in February and so did Marc Connelly, whose biblical play with an all-black cast had finally found a producer. With The Green Pastures, Marc finally proved he could accomplish a work of consequence without George Kaufman. Between attending first nights and meeting with Harold Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer, who were growing concerned by now, Dorothy tried to resurrect Sonnets in Suicide but knew it was useless. It would never be finished, and she began to grow angry at herself for listening to those who had encouraged her to start the book in the first place. “Write novels, write novels, write novels—that’s all they can say. Oh, I do get so sick and tired, sometimes.” A poem required days to write, a short story perhaps several months, but a novel seemed to last forever. The process seemed unnatural, for she had neither the taste nor the endurance for marathons. Knowing that most of her friends, writers like Benchley and Lardner for whom she had the highest regard, were also sprinters did not make her feel any happier about acknowledging her limits.
That winter she drank with Benchley at Tony’s. Aleck Woollcott purchased an apartment on the East River (named Wit’s End by Dorothy), where she turned up on Sunday mornings for his weekly breakfast party and kept his guests entertained with her wry observations. Outwardly she appeared calm, but actually she was an emotional wreck. March passed without her booking a return passage to Europe or solving the problem of the novel. It would have been sensible to tell Guinzburg that even though she wished desperately to write it she was “quite incapable of it—I’m a short-distance writer.” Almost from the start, she realized that the autobiographical material was “too painful” and that, moreover, a novel would take a very long time to complete because she wrote so slowly. This was the reason she had so little to show for her months abroad. Leveling with Guinzburg was impossible or perhaps never crossed her mind. Instead, she panicked and drank a bottle of shoe polish. While it failed to kill her, the shoe polish made her quite ill, and she was hospitalized.
Since Sonnets in Suicide had almost proved a prophetic title, Oppenheimer and Guinzburg were quick to reassure her of their understanding. Submitting to force majeure, Viking accepted the fact that no Dorothy Parker novel would top the best-seller list in 1930, even though Guinzburg did not give up hope that eventually she would fulfill her contract. To make the best of the situation and to recoup Viking’s investment, he scooped up thirteen of her short stories and sketches and announced the publication of a collection, called Laments for the Living, published in June, on Friday the thirteenth. The book’s centerpiece was “Big Blonde.” It also included “Mr. Durant” and “The Wonderful Old Gentleman,” as well as some minor pieces, like the tiresome “Mantle of Whistler,” which Viking threw in as filler.
At the end of May she left for Montana-Vermala. GOODBYE DARLING, George Oppenheimer cabled to the Leviathan, AND ALL LOVE WRITE ME SOON.
The painful issue of the unfinished novel was resolved, but probably her greatest accomplishment in New York was that she made no effort to contact John Garrett. She had finally been able to accept his rejection. Garrett did not marry until 1945. He and his wife, Madeleine, had no children, but after his retirement, when he was living in Martha’s Vineyard, he became director of the Edgartown Boys Club. In the summer of 1961, at the Martha’s Vineyard airport, he sent his chauffeur into the airline office to pick up some tickets, then fired a gun into his mouth and blew his head apart.
She found Switzerland in summertime, especially the lakes, to be extravagantly beautiful, even though she still detested the Alps and continued to regard Montana-Vermala as a village of death houses. It did not surprise her to learn that the country’s per capita consumption of alcohol was the highest in Europe.
In her absence, Patrick’s condition had improved so greatly that the Murphys left the hospital. They now lived in a chalet about a mile away and had purchased a house in town, which they refurbished as a nightclub, decorated with mirrors and red stars and named Harry’s (after Harry’s American Bar in Paris), a legitimate business open to the public and featuring good food and a dance band from Munich. Bars always comforted Dorothy, and Harry’s was one of the bright spots of her summer, a place familiar and fun that reminded her of home.
At the end of July, Benchley came over for a visit. They met him at Sierre with a car. After several welcoming rounds of Cinzanos at the depot bar, they motored up to the village because he was no more enthusiastic about the funicular than was Dorothy. His arrival put them all in a bright mood, but for Dorothy it was pure pleasure. Though he stayed at the Regina Hotel while she was at the Murphys, they immediately fell into their old routine of drinking and talking until dawn. At noon, they woke with hangovers and met for lunch at Harry’s to greet the new day with a drink. She was working diligently on a story for Cosmopolitan, about a pair of nervous, quarreling newlyweds on their honeymoon. She expected the handsome payment of twelve hundred dollars for “Here We Are.” During the afternoons, she spent several hours at her typewriter before rushing out to Harry’s to meet Benchley and the Murphys. One evening after Dorothy and Benchley closed up Harry’s and the local casino, they walked along the dark, silent streets when it suddenly occurred to him that somewhere in the desolate village there might be a lonely Harvard man. If he were condemned to live in this mining camp, Benchley declared, nothing would be more inspiring than to hear football songs, and so they began to sing “With the Crimson in Triumph Flashing,” a serenade more for themselves than for any Harvard men in the neighborhood.
A week later, they made a trip to Venice with Sara and Gerald, staying at the lavish Grand Hotel and enjoying the Venetian sights. They visited glassblowing factories and stared at Titians; they ate lunch at Florian’s and swam at the Lido in the afternoons. For practically every other meal, they dined on scampi. Late in the evenings, when they had run out of amusements, they entertained themselves with a Ouija board. At first they received fairly routine messages from an American woman named Alice who claimed to have died while traveling in Europe but soon a personality who identified herself as Elinor Wylie came through and began to make ghoulish announcements about various crimes and a few poisonings. Alarmed, they abandoned the Ouija board.
The last two days of the holiday were spent in Munich, where they drank beer at the Hofbrauhaus, attended a “not so hot” play, and went sightseeing in the rain. Gerald shopped for records by an unknown singer named Marlene Dietrich from a film called Der Blaue Engel and Dorothy bought a dachshund, Eiko von Blutenberg, whose lineage was so noble that “he has no sense and therefore is at ease in any drawing room.” He was accustomed to a diet of bratwurst because he turned up his royal nose when she offered him a dog biscuit. After they put Benchley on the sleeper for Paris, she took Eiko back to the Regina Palace Hotel and began considering a change of name—perhaps something a little less formidable. Eventually she renamed him Robinson, which was probably a tribute to the Swiss Family Robinson. Montana-Vermala seemed less lonely with the haughty Robinson trotting at her ankles.
In the meantime, Laments for the Living had been published. Sales started off exceedingly well and the book went through four editions during the first month, but Dorothy thought she deserved critical success as well. The first batch of reviews she received from George Oppenheimer were, on the whole, quite good, but a few scorned her stories as slight. It was on the uncomplimentary critiques that she fastened. All the reviews, she cabled him, SEEM TO ME BEYOND WORDS AWFUL AM SICK THAT MY BOOK FOR YOU IS SO BAD PRETTY DISCOURAGED ABOUT EVER WRITING AGAIN. She wondered whether an intelligent reviewer had given her a decent notice. Oppenheimer replied, “They are dancing in the streets, Mrs. Parker, and drinking magnums of champagne in your honor and yet you sit there and say you will never write another book for shame.” Her neediness was so great that even Oppenheimer’s glib reassurances sounded good. He hoped that she would write eight or nine books, so that The Viking Press could pay its rent and “George can have enough money to go to Europe and see you,” because he missed her so unmercifully that he “couldn’t even go near ‘21’ without shedding tears.”
Apart from the story for Cosmopolitan, she completed only a few poems, one of them a memoriam for a tubercular woman of her acquaintance, aged twenty-five, who had recently died.
Once Benchley left, there were visits from other old friends that brought less pleasure. At the end of August, Scott Fitzgerald spent a week in Montana-Vermala; Zelda had entered treatment at a psychiatric hospital near Geneva, and his preoccupation with her schizophrenia and his family’s disintegration had left him insensitive to the agonies of others. One night at Harry’s, talking about the disappointments life had dealt him, he turned to Sara and said, “I don’t suppose you have ever known despair.” Dorothy was furious at him. After Scott, Don and Bea Stewart arrived. Later Stewart admitted finding the town far more oppressive than he had imagined from Dorothy’s descriptions. Despite her jokes and Gerald’s Marlene Dietrich records, the Stewarts suffered from bad dreams and insomnia, and after a few days they hurried back to Paris.
But not before Dorothy quarreled with her old friend: Ever since she had published a New Yorker profile of Hemingway the previous year, Stewart had been simmering with indignation over her praise for a man who had vilified her, even if she knew nothing about it. Dorothy had commended Hemingway as a writer who, unlike others, would never traffic with the gentry who lived on the North Shore of Long Island, and Stewart had assumed those words meant him. In fact, she was probably thinking of herself and Benchley, and of the whole Round Table, who at one time or another had kowtowed to the Lovetts and the Whitneys. It pained Stewart to read her adulatory remarks about his former friend, with whom he had quarreled for her sake, and he told her that the piece had “hurt like hell.” Dorothy swore she had not been thinking of him, and after many cognacs, the misunderstanding was finally smoothed over. Despite Hemingway’s cordiality whenever they happened to meet, his private feelings remained hostile because the following year he composed another poem about her:
Little drops of grain alcohol
Little slugs of gin
Make the mighty notions
Make the double chin—
Lovely Mrs. Parker in the Algonquin
Loves her good dog Robinson
Keeps away from sin
Mr. Hemingway now wears glasses
Better to see to kiss the critics’ asses—
It seemed to be the season for quarreling. One morning at breakfast she got embroiled in a ridiculous but upsetting dispute with Gerald, who had reprimanded Baoth with a severity so stinging that Dorothy found it intolerable to witness. When she asked him not to be so hard on the boy, Gerald advised her to mind her own business. It was her business, she replied, because she thought he was being mean to his son, and she had a right to express her opinion. Finally she threatened to leave, and Gerald agreed it might be for the best.
While that quarrel was predictably mended, she found the conflicts unsettling. In fact, the atmosphere seethed with tension and festering angers. Patrick’s ordeal had left its mark on the health of both his parents—Gerald suffered from depression and Sara, in poor physical health since her son had fallen ill, developed a gall-bladder disorder. In October, Sara traveled to Cannes for treatment and Dorothy came along as a companion for Honoria, but almost as soon as they reached the Hotel Majestic, she changed her mind about remaining with the Murphys. AM NEARLY GONE WITH LONELINESS AND DISCOURAGEMENT, she cabled Oppenheimer. It was melodramatic but true. From Cannes she cabled Benchley that it would be ALL RIGHT WITH ME IF NEVER SEE ANYONE UNDER SIXTY AGAIN and asked him to send her a kind word.
After booking passage on the Saturnia, she wired Viking for a thousand dollars. A few days later, apologizing for being a pest, she requested another thousand because she was having difficulty paying her bills and promised Harold and George repayment from the money Cosmopolitan owed her for “Here We Are.” She remembered to cable birthday greetings to her sister, and finally, to Benchley, she reported that the Saturnia would be sailing from Cannes on November 15 and
ARRIVING NEW YORK SO FAR AS I CAN MAKE OUT SOME TIME IN EARLY APRIL ... AND WILL I BE GLAD TO SEE YOU DEAREST FRED.
Getting away from it all had been fine, she wrote, but “when the day comes .that you have to tie a string around your finger to remind yourself of what it was you were forgetting, it is time for you to go back home.” Unfortunately, her bank account was so overdrawn that it looked “positively photographic,” and as a consequence she had to find walking-around money in a hurry. She wanted to retire to a vine-covered cottage in the country where she could “spend the rest of my life raising cheques,” but that idea lacked practicality, and soon she was working for The New Yorker again. In January, her Constant Reader column appeared for the first time in two years, opening with “Maybe you think I was just out in the ladies’ room all this time,” and in mid-February, when Benchley went to Hollywood for two months, she agreed to take his place as the magazine’s theater critic. She found the job of play reviewing just as unpleasant as ever. Her first review concluded with a plea, “Personal: Robert Benchley, please come home,” an appeal that might just as easily have been voiced by Gertrude Benchley.
Benchley led a classic double life. His domestic and extramarital arrangements confined Gertrude to Scarsdale, where she seemed content to raise the boys and paste Robert’s newspaper clippings into scrapbooks. After breaking with the chorus girl, Benchley had a lengthy affair with actress Betty Starbuck. After that his love life grew too complex to document easily. In addition to the prostitutes he patronized at Polly Adler’s, he made routine overtures to countless women and very often met with success. At any given time, there were four or five women openly claiming to be madly in love with him. Ending these infatuations proved difficult sometimes. The wife of a well-known banker was so eager to continue sleeping with him that she once crawled through the transom of his room at the Royalton Hotel. In 1931, he began a long-term relationship with Louise “Louie” Macy, a Smith College graduate who worked as a saleswoman at Hattie Carnegie’s fashionable shop. Their first dates were threesomes that included Dorothy, which caused Louie to conclude that Mrs. Parker was one of his lovers. The adoring Louie would do practically anything for him, including the selection of Gertrude’s Christmas gifts at Hattie Carnegie. Benchley treated her—all his women for that matter—with a protective courtliness that verged on the Victorian. Escorting her home at the end of an evening, he shook her hand and said, “Thank you very much. I had a wonderful time.” This performance misled Louie’s sister Gert so completely that it was years before she realized that Louie’s relationship with Benchley had been sexual.
Soon after Dorothy’s return to New York, she met a reporter who worked for the New York Sun, a husky, sandy-haired man with a cheerful manner that put people at ease. His name was John McClain, and he was twenty-seven years old. A native of Marion, Ohio, he had played football at Brown where he had been one of the so-called Iron Men, players who never needed a substitute. He returned to Ohio for graduate work at Kenyon College. In spite of his education, McClain remained on the bottom rung of the ladder in New York journalism. He frequently was assigned to cover shipping news and strove for promotion to the Sun’s regular ship reporter. For the time being, he scraped along on little money, rode the subway to work, and lived on Morton Street in the Village, where the flat he shared with two other young men seldom knew heat or hot water.
In more ways than one, McClain was a hungry man, determined not to live in a cold-water flat any longer than necessary. Among his assets were blond good looks and a well-built, athletic body, in which he took great pride. He kept fit with regular workouts at a gym. A friend later described him as pink and white, “the male equivalent of a Rubens nude,” while another observer graphically portrayed him as “a bohunk.” So often had women told him he was good in bed that he had come to believe it. He realized that one way to infiltrate New York’s smart circles might be on the arms of well-known women. Not bothering to bandy words among his friends, McClain bluntly announced his premeditated campaign of fornicating his way to a more satisfying life. His first success was torch singer Libby Holman. Before long, he was frequenting saloons like Tony’s and Moriarty’s, where his winning demeanor and convivial drinking skills made him popular with the literary crowd.
McClain knew Dorothy by reputation only, because his arrival in the city had coincided with her absence from it. One night they were introduced at Tony’s, and McClain set out being seductive and ingratiating. While he may have been genuinely attracted to her, it was probably also true that had she not been a celebrity he wouldn’t have glanced twice at a woman ten years his senior. At that particular time she was looking far from her best anyway. Her face remained lovely—at times she still resembled an adolescent—but her body was bloated from alcohol and her chin was doubling. This failed to deter McClain, who escorted her back to the Algonquin and settled down for the night.
Afterward, he bragged to friends about his success. He boasted that Dorothy had assured him he was a good lover and added that she knew some tricks herself, which he enumerated as if she were a neighborhood tart.
Meanwhile, Dorothy assumed that John McClain’s desire was genuine and rejoiced at her good fortune. At first they had enjoyable times together because he was star-struck, awed by the glamour of her life, and eager for introductions to people in the literary community.
One of her regular drinking companions was John O’Hara, whom she had known since 1928 as a reporter and rewrite man on the New York Herald Tribune. Dorothy believed his short stories showed unusual promise and steadfastly championed him to editors as a coming major writer, at a time when others doubted he was exceptional. Although O’Hara was not physically attractive to her—he had bad teeth and acne—she enjoyed his company late at night when he joined her at Tony’s. She assured him he would never be happy because he was a genius, and she further bet him that if Ernest Hemingway read some of his stories he would want to cut his own throat. “I am sorry to be compelled to add,” O’Hara wrote to his brother, “that Mrs. Parker was tight, but I understand she has told other people the same thing about me,” and he was right. O’Hara admired John McClain whose dashing self-assurance and success with women represented the type of male O’Hara wished he could be.
William Faulkner, another friend of Dorothy’s, impressed her as a vulnerable country boy in desperate need of her protection. She introduced him to the Round Table and her New Yorker friends, and she further made sure he received a welcome in the drawing rooms of rich people like Adele and Robert Lovett. In the fall of 1931, when Faulkner was staying at the Algonquin, she gave a cocktail party in his honor. He turned up late with an old friend of his, Eric Devine, by which time most of the guests were gassed. So was the hostess, who proudly passed around manuscript pages from Light in August, the novel he was working on at the time. Eric Devine recalled that John McClain was so firmly glued to Dorothy’s side as to leave no doubt about the intimacy of their relations.
With or without McClain, Dorothy and Robinson went out every night. Some people felt sorry for poor Robinson who would try to sleep under a table in the smoke and noise of Tony’s at two or three in the morning. Given her love for animals, Frank Sullivan thought, “she could have been a little more considerate.” He might have been more disapproving had he known that when Dorothy took her nightly sleeping pills she sometimes fed one to Robinson so that he wouldn’t wake up too early the next day.
Occasionally there was an evening memorable for its serenity. Once she and John were drinking double Scotches at Tony’s with a group that included Benchley, Vernon Duke, and Monty Woolley, when the conversation turned sentimentally to Paris and the city’s special beauty in springtime. “Oh,” somebody sighed, “to be in Paris now that April’s there!” What a great title for a song, Duke recalled remarking, whereupon the obliging Tony Soma escorted them upstairs to a delapidated piano, and Duke composed the music for “April in Paris,” while everyone hummed along quietly.
With a new man in her life, Dorothy felt compelled to slim down and smarten up her appearance. As she had done with John Garrett, she telephoned McClain every day to arrange their meeting later in the evening. She expected to be the only woman in his life, but this John behaved remarkably like the old one and soon began to vocalize his martyrdom. He felt smothered, resented her demands, and began to invent engagements. Increasingly, he told Dorothy that he was fatigued after work, then he had to work out at the gym, and after that he was exhausted and simply wanted to crawl back to his flat and tumble into bed. To his friends McClain grumbled that Dorothy refused to leave him alone and it took all of his ingenuity to escape her.
At the outset, some of Dorothy’s friends sized up McClain as a social climber and a sponge who had no qualms about taking advantage of her. Bea Stewart despised him, and others tried to caution Dorothy, but she disregarded their warnings. She was even able to find humor in John’s social aspirations and his gargantuan appetite for women who owned penthouses and luxurious country estates. He was only twenty-seven and she made up her mind to be tolerant of his imperfections.
At one of her cocktail parties, to which McClain had been invited, she waited expectantly for him to suggest dinner together. He said nothing and finally asked if he might use her telephone. Everyone in the room could hear him confirming a dinner engagement elsewhere, and off he went. Dorothy broke the tension with a quip and a shrug.
“I have no squash courts,” she said. “What can I do?”
What she did was to write about her lover, although he proved less inspiring than his predecessors. Death and Taxes, a collection of verse published that year by Viking, was mostly written before she met McClain, but a few of the poems apply to him: “Every love’s the love before / In a duller dress.” She entertained her friends with postmortems on the latest outrage he had perpetrated. After a quarrel, when he called her a lousy lay and slammed out, she said that his body had gone to his head. She described him as a male prostitute, who mistook her for a stepladder so that he could climb into the beds of famous women. When she once learned that a wealthy Long Island socialite had invited him to her home for the weekend, Dorothy predicted that he would be back “as soon as he has licked all the gilt off her ass.”
Depressed, Dorothy described 1932 as “this year of hell” and again attempted to kill herself, this time with barbiturates, after preparing a last will and testament and setting it aside for Benchley’s attention. “Any royalties on my books are to go to John McClain. My clothes and my wrist-watch to my sister, Helen Droste, also my little dog Robinson—Dorothy Parker.” But her resolve to die was not particularly solid. On a Thursday evening at the end of February, she made her departure with sleeping powders, but it was apparently the will of God that she be shipped back like an undelivered letter, to the Hotel Algonquin, 59 West Forty-fourth Street, New York City, return receipt attached. On Friday afternoon, feeling like a cadaver but nonetheless very much alive, she managed to call Dr. Barach and explain what had happened.
With stoic patience, Barach began to question her about how many powders she had actually taken. Not enough, it turned out. Evidently he did not suppose her to be in serious danger, because he only reserved a room at Presbyterian and arranged for an ambulance.
The newspapers had a field day with the story of Dorothy’s overdose, even though Dr. Barach tried to minimize the incident by saying it was of so little consequence that he had no plans to visit her in the hospital. His inference that knocking herself out might have been an accident was understandably dismissed, because by this time she had an Olympic-sized track record as an attempted suicide.
Since she dreaded returning to the Algonquin, she welcomed an offer to convalesce at the country estate of one of her women friends. Every care was lavished upon her. She was coddled twenty-four hours a day and surrounded by so much solicitude, so much harping about her health, that before long she felt suffocated. A few days later she sent friends a martyred telegram: SEND ME A SAW INSIDE A LOAF OF BREAD, and propelled herself back to Manhattan where she resumed her nightly rounds and her drinking.
The relationship with John had become impossible. After her suicide attempt, he announced to many that he considered it a typical female scheme, staged in the hope that she could tie him to her. He professed to have lost respect for her.
Not long afterward, they broke off for good. Subsequently McClain made a reputation for himself on the New York Sun with a bylined ship-news column, “The Sun Deck.” In the late 1930s, he went to Hollywood, where he worked as a screenwriter and shared a house with Benchley, who had become a close friend. During the war he served with valor in the Navy, then distinguished himself as drama critic of the New York Journal-American. In 1951 he married for the first time, and when his wife died, he remarried; both marriages were happy. During his last years he suffered from cancer of the mouth and died (just a few weeks before Dorothy) of a liver ailment at the age of sixty-three.
It was a rough year. The world beyond Tony’s and the Algonquin darkened: In March, there were eighty-six bread lines in New York, one third of the work force was unemployed, and the average family income plunged to sixteen hundred dollars a year. Every week the papers carried stories about people who had lost hope and jumped to their deaths from rooftops or spent their last nickel on razor blades to kill themselves. Everyone seemed to be scared or desperate or suffering in some way, although it was hard to guess the country’s financial deterioration by the way some of Dorothy’s affluent friends continued to frolic. They still rose at the crack of noon to gossip with the manicurists who arrived to do their nails. Dorothy later ridiculed them in a short story, “From the Diary of a New York Lady,” which she pointedly subtitled, “During Days of Horror, Despair, and World Change.”
Can’t face deciding whether to wear the blue with the white jacket or the purple with the beige roses. Every time I look at those revolting black nails, I want to absolutely yip. I really have the most horrible things happen to me of anybody in the entireworld. Damn Miss Rose.
That winter, to escape the painful memories she now associated with her Algonquin suite, she moved to the Lowell, at 28 East Sixty-third Street, a fairly new residential hotel that had been decorated in the fashionable Art Deco style. Her comfortably furnished flat even had a big easy chair in which she liked to curl up and read, but living there was far beyond her means. It had been nine months since she had done any work for The New Yorker; only once in the past year had she managed to complete a short story, and she was flat broke. She owed money to practically everybody she knew and was obliged to accept alms from many she did not. The Lowell seemed glad to have her as a tenant, perhaps because the publicity offset the drawback of seldom receiving her rent.
In the months that followed the barbiturate incident, convinced that the two most beautiful words in the English language were “cheque” and “enclosed,” she began to give diligent attention to her shaky financial position. Though difficult to acknowledge, she knew writing poetry did not provide enough revenue to sustain the high life to which she had grown accustomed, and she decided to abandon it, at least for the time being. Harold Guinzburg was eager to publish a second volume of short stories, but she had to write them first, a task that had grown no easier for having been absent from her typewriter for so long. To break through a writer’s block that was proving as deep as the Grand Canyon, she formulated a desperate solution. She asked some of her friends to become duennas; more specifically, they were to park at the Lowell for three or four hours and look busy, with what “I don’t really know, to make me speed up and feel ashamed of myself when I incline to be lazy.” As always, she rewrote so extensively that progress was slow, but she also began to produce some fine work: “Horsie,” “Lady with a Lamp,” “Dusk Before Fireworks,” “Advice to the Little Peyton Girl,” and “Diary of a New York Lady.”
When she was asked to compose an introduction to a collection of Jim Thurber’s cartoons, The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments, she was delighted to comply. Not only had she taken a fancy to Thurber as a drinking companion, but also she admired his drawings, which she liked to present as Christmas gifts to her friends. In her eyes, his strange men, women, and dogs resembled “unbaked cookies”; she understood them perfectly because they seemed to expect so little from life. Like herself, they were people who “remember the old discouragements and await the new.” Whenever she looked at one of Thurber’s hounds, she went soft with sentiment. Nobody, she decided, could have dreamed up dogs like those unless he felt as she did about animals. The awesome fact was that Thurber actually owned fourteen dogs.
In mid-July, the Murphys closed Villa America and moved their family to the States, although they continued to spend holidays abroad. After the death of Gerald’s father, the Mark Cross Company had lacked leadership, and he decided to re-enter the family business. After a brief stay in East Hampton, Long Island, and a reunion with Pauline and Ernest Hemingway in Montana, they finally settled down in a Bedford Village, New York, house and a Manhattan apartment. Dorothy continued to ridicule Adele Lovett and other well-off friends, whom she satirized cruelly in “Horsie” and “Diary of a New York Lady,” but she never joked about the Murphys, because she loved them.
In the meantime, she found herself the object of surprising and unwanted attention. George Oppenheimer, dissatisfied with the publishing business and ambitious to become a writer, had been working on a play whose central character’s personality was modeled on herself. Other characters were supposed to be Robert Benchley and Donald Stewart. At the outset, he had been collaborating with Ruth Goodman, daughter of producer Philip Goodman, but she withdrew from the project leaving him to muddle along on his own. While Dorothy continued to tolerate Oppenheimer, she had few illusions about his skill as a dramatist, did not take kindly to the idea of seeing herself on stage, and strongly suspected that the play would mean more “fresh hell,” all of which proved to be precisely the case. Here Today, bearing the subtitle “A Comedy of Bad Manners,” opened in September with Ruth Gordon playing Dorothy and George Kaufman directing. Dorothy attended opening night with Bennett Cerf. Throughout the performance he noticed her wriggling in the seat, enraged at the stage caricature of herself and muttering threats against Oppenheimer’s life. Afterward, she and Cerf went backstage, where she threw her arms around the playwright and assured him she had enjoyed the play.
“Oh, you caught me so perfectly!” she declared. “It was absolutely wonderful! How did you do it?”
Here Today mercifully ran only five weeks, although it would remain a favorite with summer stock companies for the next twenty-five years.
Here Today was the least of her concerns. Robinson had been attacked by a large dog and injured so seriously that it had been necessary to hospitalize him. She tried to hide her anxiety with jokes. The owner of the other dog refused to take responsibility and even had the temerity to claim that Robinson provoked the attack. Dorothy was indignant. “I have no doubt that he was also carrying a revolver,” she said vehemently to Aleck Woollcott. As comfort until the dachshund recovered, friends gave her a huge stuffed English sheepdog.
Robinson failed to pull through, however. Dorothy, who had been exceptionally attached to him, grieved inconsolably. Earlier that year, when Vanity Fair asked her to sit for a full-length portrait by Edward Steichen, she insisted that Robinson must be included in the shot. Steichen photographed her seated in an ornate high-back chair with her hands demurely tucked into a muff. On the floor behind the chair, Robinson was gazing off loftily into the distance, as if the whole business was beneath his dignity. The result was a lovely photograph, one of the very few to show her smiling broadly.
In the hope of alleviating her bereavement after Robinson’s death, Sara Murphy proposed a trip to Paris. Dorothy, feeling she deserved a vacation, asked Viking Press for a thousand-dollar advance on her next book. At the end of October, the two women sailed on the luxurious Europa, the interior decor of which combined Buckingham Palace, the Munich Hofbrauhaus, and Radio City Music Hall. They would be away for a month.
Although traveling first class, Dorothy soon began spending time in third. Aboard ship was the mother of Tom Mooney, the West Coast labor leader who had been convicted of a bombing and was serving a twenty-three-year sentence in San Quentin. Dorothy sought her out and learned that she was traveling to Russia with a delegation of American Communists. Mary Mooney, Dorothy decided, had the presence of a queen, or at least the manners that queens ought to have. She was a big, chunky Irish woman, eighty-four years old, wearing a string of shiny green beads and an emerald green scarf over an old wool sweater.
A few days later, when the Communists announced a meeting in the third-class dining hall, Dorothy took the opportunity to attend. She carefully examined the stocky women with short hair and the serious black men wearing gold-rimmed glasses. They seemed terribly young and earnest, but their speeches about Tom Mooney and others struck her as “much too long and much too muddy and with many—too many—sweeping allusions to the woiking class and the bawss class.” It was their style she found objectionable, not the content of the speeches, with which in fact she was in total agreement. This marked her second exposure to the American Communist Party. The first, during the Sacco-Vanzetti demonstrations five years earlier, had been completely accidental. Aboard the Europa, however, she deliberately went in search of the Party. Even though she found fault with Party rhetoric, her reaction to the meeting was significant. She immediately composed a letter to the New York Sun praising Mary Mooney as “the best person on this ship, and I wish that were higher praise.” The letter, published in the Sun and picked up by other papers throughout the country, left no doubt where Dorothy stood on the subject of Tom Mooney. She believed him innocent.
In the company of old friends, Dorothy felt happier than she had in months. The first night in Paris, she and Sara had a long dinner with the Murphys’ close friend Dick Myers. For the next three weeks, they did nothing but ramble around the city, attending cocktail parties and teas and dining at Lipp’s and all her favorite restaurants.
When she arrived home on December 1 a few pounds heavier, she had to admit that she had done absolutely nothing abroad but relax and amuse herself. In merry spirits, she telephoned Frank Adams at his office. “How now, Mr. Pepys, would you like a poem for keeps?” she asked and then proceeded to dictate a poem to him over the phone.
That fall, Dorothy spent at least four hours a day at her typewriter. Once dusk began to settle, however, she chafed at this hermetic life and began telephoning friends, asking where they were going to be later in the evening. Certain stops were mandatory: Tony’s, “21,” Benchley’s suite at the Hotel Royalton. She was welcome at the Village home of Howard and Betty Dietz or at Polly Adler’s or in the clubs in Harlem—everywhere—regardless of her condition. “She and Fanny Brice, they were the queens of the town,” recalled Ruth Goodman Goetz. “They divided New York between them.” One evening Dorothy dropped in at a cocktail party hosted by producer Courtney Burr, who was starting rehearsals for a Bea Lillie revue, as yet untitled. He hoped one of the forty or fifty guests he had invited might come up with something clever.
Dorothy walked in late and tight. She was dressed to kill in a black Lanvin gown, feathered cloche, and opera-length gloves and smelled like the ground-floor perfume department at Bergdorf’s. When Burr introduced her to one of the show’s authors, she shifted to automatic pilot and began to ladle compliments upon the writer comparing him to Congreve, Oscar Wilde, and Noel Coward. A native of Providence, Rhode Island, Sidney J. Perelman had worked for the Marx Brothers on Monkey Business and Horse Feathersbut was still struggling to establish a firm toehold in the theater. Twenty-eight, of medium height with blue eyes and wire-rimmed glasses, he was married to Laura West, the sister of another aspiring writer, Nathanael West, who currently was employed as the manager of the Hotel Sutton. Sid Perelman later wrote that “Dorothy Parker was already a legend when I first met her in the autumn of 1932.”
When Courtney Burr asked the assembled guests to think of a good name for his revue, all eyes naturally swiveled to Dorothy, who suggested Sing High, Sing Low. But no, wait a minute, she added, that wasn’t sparkling enough. How about Pousse-Café? There were approving nods and murmurs of “oh, I love it” and “just darling,” but when Dorothy glanced around she noticed Perelman looking glum.
“What do you think of Pousse-Café, Mr. Perelman?” she asked.
Perelman, with enthusiasm that was clearly feigned, pronounced her title “great” but wondered if it really carried enough punch. When Dorothy countered with Aces Up, he called her suggestion “marvellous” but continued to look doubtful.
“I just wonder, though,” he said, “if we can’t find something a tiny bit sharper, less static ...”
“Well, goodness me,” she said, spraying him with a smile. “What ever shall we do? Our wrist has been slapped by the house genius there, who feels that we’re a bit dull-witted. Of course, he’s in a position to know, isn’t he, leaning down from Parnassus—”
By this time, some of the guests had begun drifting uneasily toward the door, and a nervous Burr was trying to switch Dorothy off, decharge the atmosphere, and get his party moving again, to no avail. She was just warming up. Perelman made his escape, vowing that if he ever again ran into Dorothy Parker, legend or no legend, “I’d skewer her with one of her own hatpins.”
The next day, sober and remorseful, Dorothy was stricken to recall dimly that she had been rude to Perelman. She lost no time in sending him a dozen of the most expensive roses she could buy with a note of abject apology. Courtney Burr’s untitled show was eventually christened, by someone other than Dorothy, Walk a Little Faster, and it ran 119 performances. The friendship between Dorothy and Sid Perelman survived for thirty-five years.