Chapter 13
1936-1937
All through the middle and late thirties, Dorothy was engaged in feverish warfare, but some observers found it hard to say what side she was on. In the spring of 1936, John O’Hara paid a visit to Hollywood and stayed briefly as a houseguest with Dorothy and Alan, who were living grandly on their fifteen hundred dollars a week. His eyeballs rolled up. “They have,” he recounted peevishly to Scott Fitzgerald,
a large white house, Southern style, and live in luxury, including a brand new Picasso, a Packard convertible phaeton, a couple of Negroes, and dinner at the very best Beverly Hills homes. Dottie occasionally voices a great discontent, but I think her aversion to movie-writing is as much lazy as intellectual. She likes the life. She and Alan are with Paramount, writing a courtroom picture for Claudette Colbert. Don Stewart, who is full of shit, has converted himself to radical thought, and goes to all the parties for the Scottsboro boys. His wife, who is more honest and whom I don’t like either, stays home from them.... He is certainly scared about something, and it isn’t only the Revolution. But he is such a horse’s ass that it doesn’t matter much....
There is no mention of Dorothy’s political activities, most likely because O’Hara was unable or unready to decode the signals he was receiving from his one-time mentor. When Robert Benchley wrote to his wife at the end of April, he too mentioned the new political awareness that was sweeping Hollywood. The Scottsboro case had become a cause célèbre among liberals and Communists. Everybody was eager to organize a screenwriters’ union or join a committee to free the eight black Alabama youths convicted of raping two white girls. “Dottie and Alan,” Benchley added, “are on all committees at once, and seem to be very happy about it.”
What drew her attention most powerfully was news of the Third Reich’s persecution of Jews. Her ambivalence over her own Jewishness was so great that she would think of herself as a “mongrel” because of her mixed origins to the end of her life. At the same time, she found anti-Semitism terrifying and had begun to take a passionate, emotional interest in what was happening politically in Germany. At a hundred-dollar-a-plate banquet that she co-hosted with Don Stewart and others, she heard a firsthand account of the situation. The dinner speaker was a professional Communist propagandist, although it is unlikely that Dorothy knew anything about Otto Katz’s politics that evening. A native of Prague and a former Berlin journalist, Katz was a suave and extremely persuasive man who spoke five languages and could talk about Kafka as easily as he could about Karl Marx. In 1936, he was acting as chief of staff for the legendary Willi Münzenberg, the German Communist who had escaped the Nazis and established a new headquarters for Comintern propaganda in Paris. Münzenberg is credited with being the first to recognize the advantages to be gained by quietly recruiting the support of eminent intellectuals, cultivating the friendship of these distinguished fellow travelers by subtle means, rarely quite aboveboard. He wooed foreign sympathizers such as Clarence Darrow and André Gide to the Soviet cause. Otto Katz had figured importantly in this work. He also had helped to compile Münzenberg’s Brown Book, an indictment of Hitler that had been translated into twenty-three languages.
During his visit to Hollywood, Katz avoided expressing himself in Communist terminology, nor did he go out of his way to publicize his association with Münzenberg, whose name probably would have meant nothing to his audience anyway. Although Katz spoke eloquently about the importance of maintaining ties of friendship with the Soviet Union, he presented his primary allegiance as the cause of combatting fascism. Don Stewart recalled that when Katz began to describe the Nazi terror, “the details of which he had been able to collect only through repeatedly risking his own life, I was proud to be sitting beside him, proud to be on his side in the fight.”
When Otto Katz called for the cooperation of the film colony in fighting Hitler and preventing a second world war, Dorothy saw an opportunity to make herself useful. Together with Stewart, Fredric March, and Oscar Hammerstein II, she helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League to propagandize actively against Hitler. Offices were rented, a weekly newspaper was published, and public meetings were sponsored. Stars, writers, and directors contributed donations, and the studio heads offered enthusiastic support. Don Stewart became the League’s chairman, Alan its secretary, and Dorothy a member of the executive board.
Several months later, after it was rumored that the League might be a Red organization, some stars dropped out and producers withdrew for fear they were contributing to Communism. By this time, Otto Katz was back on the other side of the Atlantic, his mission successful. Despite the early dropouts, the League continued to thrive and its membership eventually reached some four thousand.
Dorothy began moving away from people who failed to take the threat of fascism seriously, those who would not be convinced “until they see what has happened.” She turned to another group. The white house on Roxbury Drive soon became the scene of buffet suppers that appeared to be ordinary social functions. At some point in the evening, Dorothy introduced a Marxist lecturer or a trade unionist, sometimes a German refugee, and she urged the need for generous contributions. She gave a dinner to raise money for the defense of the Scottsboro boys. One weekend, she and Alan, along with Don Stewart and a delegation of film writers, were invited to San Francisco for a conference being sponsored by the League of American Writers. This was an openly left-wing affair, whose speakers included Harry Bridges, the Australian-born leader of the International Longshoremen’s Union, and Ella Winter, the widow of Lincoln Steffens. Welcoming the screenwriters, Winter said that the movement needed their spirit and humor. She flattered Dorothy and Don by describing them as people who “in one sentence can help us more than a thousand jargon-filled pamphlets.” Later, she met them at a nearby cocktail lounge and introduced them to Bridges, who promptly won them over with his humor and ability to put away respectable quantities of bourbon. Everyone relaxed and got drunk. The next day the visitors made a trip to San Quentin prison and spoke with Tom Mooney.
Dorothy had been arrested during the Sacco-Vanzetti demonstrations, but nine years later, with no attempt at concealment on her part, her leftist tendencies still baffled those who knew her well and those who believed they did. If her support on behalf of two anarchists was not taken seriously, neither did she receive respectful attention when she began to speak warningly about Franco and Hitler. To many observers (including some of her most intimate friends), the source of her radicalism was obvious: She was playing amateur revolutionary, just as she once had played amateur suicide. This was nothing but theatrics.
Even her appearance underwent an evolution. In the days when she had been broke, she had always managed to turn herself out in fine outfits from Valentino and Hattie Carnegie. Since moving to Hollywood, she had hundred-dollar underwear and nightgowns made at an exclusive Beverly Hills shop. Outwardly, however, she began to adopt the proletariat look—a ruffled peasant blouse, baggy dirndl skirt cinched in at the waist, flat-heeled shoes, a babushka wrapping her hair and tied under the chin, so that only the dark bangs stuck out. You didn’t see many women looking like that in Hollywood. There were days when she showed up at Paramount dressed like a Ukrainian farm woman getting ready to climb on a tractor. For that matter, she also bore more than a passing resemblance to those 1890-style sweatshop workers jogging along Hester Street with bundles of shirtwaists riding on their heads. J. Henry Rothschild would have swooned.
Dorothy declined to explain the reasons for this transformation. As she wrote in New Masses, “I cannot tell you on what day what did what to me,” a statement that shed little light on the subject. She did recount a childhood memory: She and her Aunt Lizzie Rothschild were watching men shovel snow outside the house on West Sixty-eighth Street when Lizzie said that it was nice there had been a blizzard—now the men had work. “And I knew then it was not so nice that men could work for their lives only in desperate weather, that there was no work for them when it was fair.” She also alluded to the Sacco-Vanzetti executions by noting that at certain times of her life, she had felt “wild” with the knowledge of injustice but had not known what to do. It amazed and amused her that she had to come to Hollywood, of all the improbable places, to discover ways of fighting values she had always hated.
With more generosity than accuracy, she gave credit for her radicalization to Don Stewart, though he corrected this error in his memoirs by observing that she “had ‘gone left’ before I had.” She felt intense rapport with Stewart, who was also losing friends and suffering for his new beliefs. Alan was, according to Budd Schulberg, “a genuine left liberal who had a little trouble stomaching the Party,” but he put aside his own beliefs when they conflicted with his wife’s enthusiasms. This was not true in Stewart’s marriage. Bea objected vigorously to his political activities. As Robert Benchley sympathetically commented, “Don pretty difficult in past two years, all wrapped up in his guilds and leagues and soviets.” In due course, Bea divorced him and married Count Ilya Andreyevich Tolstoy, a grandson of Leo Tolstoy, whom she met in Florida, where he was managing the Marine Aquarium without a dime to his illustrious name. In 1939, Don Stewart married Lincoln Steffens’s widow, Ella Winter. Throughout the thirties and forties he worked on a number of highly successful films, such as The Philadelphia Story, while continuing his political involvements. By 1951, he immigrated to England, blacklisted.
Dorothy, meanwhile, had begun to divide the world into two camps: those who smiled at her indulgently and the like-minded leftist friends whom she referred to as “my own people.” She preferred the company of her own people, including Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. Her feelings were reflected in a tart remark she made about Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent and a journalist she disliked for his callous attitude toward the Russians: “When the train of history went around a sharp curve, he fell out of the dining car.” In her eyes, history had shoved a great many people out of the dining car. Out of affection and nostalgia, she continued to maintain ties with the Murphys, the Guinzburgs, and Aleck Woollcott, but she dropped people like Adele Lovett. She felt saddest of all about Benchley. At first, eager for his support, she had counted on his understanding because he believed that the new progressive movement was good for Hollywood. He paid twenty dollars to attend a fund-raising dinner on behalf of German-Jewish refugees. Afterward, he complained to Gertrude that such affairs were “all very laudable—but expensive.” As Dorothy kept inching further to the left, she soon realized he was not following, but appeared to be increasingly skeptical of her direction.
A serious break occurred the following year, when she and Benchley both happened to be visiting New York and met for drinks at “21.” Cannoning him with a fusillade of leftist ideology, she espoused her views with such militancy that Benchley was taken aback and greatly angered. He reacted to what probably struck him as political arrogance by launching an indirect counterattack and told her “not to make those ingenue eyes at me,” because she was no longer an ingenue. Writing to Sara and Gerald Murphy about it, he said, “Dottie didn’t mind my views on her labor activities but the ‘ingenue’ line (so I am told) cut her to the quick.” In fact, she objected violently to both. For several months, she refused to answer his phone calls or visit him at the Garden of Allah, until eventually the intercession of friends brought about a reconciliation.
Benchley’s reference to labor activities meant Dorothy’s fierce belief that screenwriters should be organized. She had been in Hollywood a very short time when she stopped marveling about the fairy-tale salaries studios paid to their writers. She was dismayed to learn that few writers had the credentials to command hundreds of dollars a week and that for every Parker or Loos or Hecht, someone was earning slave wages.
I saw some of the most stinkingest practices you’d ever want to see. People—honest, hard workers were thrown out of their jobs, without warning, without justice. People were hired on what is called “spec”—which meant that they wrote without pay, with the understanding that if their work was accepted they would be paid—and then their work would be used, but they would be fired—still without pay. The average wage of a screen writer was forty dollars a week. [Well, that] would have been perfectly corking except that there was a catch to it. The average term of employment was two weeks in a year.
In the summer of 1936, a drive got under way to recruit new members for the Screen Writers Guild, the union that had been formed four years earlier but had encountered violent opposition from the studios, who refused to accord it recognition or bargaining power. Many writers considered unions beneath the professional dignity of so-called artists. Needless to say, Dorothy was not among them, nor did she have sympathy for those who later affiliated themselves with a rival, studio-supported union known as the Screen Playwrights. Expecting studios to represent the rights of writers, she was said to have remarked, “was like trying to get laid in your mother’s house. Somebody was always in the parlor, watching.” At a meeting where a number of well-known writers spoke out against affiliation with the Guild, she was enraged to hear Richard Schayer, a writer who had been in the business for twenty years, insist that “screenwriting is a soft racket.” He saw no reason for writers to gum up the works. “Especially when the Mothership [MGM] objects,” Dorothy retorted. She was furious. For the Screen Guilds’ Magazine she wrote a toxic rebuttal to Schayer and saracastically titled it “To Richard—With Love.”
I do not feel that I am participating in a soft racket (and what the hell, by the way, is a hard racket?) when I am writing for the screen. Nor do I want to be part of any racket, hard or soft, or three-and-a-half minutes.... I have never in my life been paid so much, either—well, why am I here, and why are you, and why is Mr. Schayer? But I can look my God and my producer—whom I do not, as do many, confuse with each other—in the face, and say that I have earned every cent of it.
Her anger at writers who “wouldn’t join because they were individuals, they were artists, because it wasn’t genteel, because they were ladies, they were gentlemen” did not abate either. Two years later, when a writer she was trying to persuade to join the Guild said he didn’t believe that creative writers belonged in unions, she saw red. “That sonofabitch telling me that he’s a creative writer! If he’s a creative writer, I’m Marie of Rumania.”
To those who feared the word union, she wanted to say: “Now, look, baby, ‘union’ is spelled with five letters. It is not a four-letter word.”
After settling in Hollywood, Dorothy frequently saw Sid and Laura Perelman, who were working as a writing team at Paramount. Disenchanted with the film business, the Perelmans would instantly decamp once they had completed a picture. Dorothy paid careful attention when they began extolling the virtues of the farm they had purchased in Pennsylvania. Judging from their poetic description, Bucks County was an unspoiled stretch of country north of Philadelphia along the Delaware River, a place where the eye beheld vistas on every side that refreshed the soul, a pastoral retreat of covered bridges and stone barns, gently rolling hills, and unpretentious hamlets that might have graced the Cotswolds before the advent of the Industrial Revolution. In other words, it sounded everything that Beverly Hills was not. The Perelmans reported that even though the area had been invaded by artists and writers, property was still relatively inexpensive. There were bargains to be found if one made the effort.
These delirious references to Bucks County began to intrigue Dorothy. She found herself growing receptive to the idea of trees and grass, vegetation synonymous in her mind with suburban living. Suddenly she was struck by a gloomy thought.
“We haven’t any roots, Alan,” she said. “You can’t put down roots in Beverly Hills. But look at Laura and Sid—they’ve got roots, a place to come home to. Roots, roots.”
Alan’s eyes were already misty. As he too warmed to the prospect of becoming a country squire, the interior decorator lurking within came bubbling to the surface. Nothing like their home on North Roxbury Drive would do, nothing that came equipped with washing machines and stainless-steel kitchens. Instead, he visualized a place they could refurbish to suit their tastes, the kind of old house that had character.
They visited New York in July. It was a slow, sultry journey in a baking-hot compartment. When they reached Kansas, Dorothy wired Sara and Gerald, cheerfully swearing that the next time she crossed the continent by railroad it would be in a coffin covered with an American flag. Once they had checked into the Surrey Hotel, they lost no time in heading to Bucks County to inspect the Perelmans’ rustic paradise for themselves. Sid and Laura introduced them to Jack Boyle, Tinicum township’s resident anarchist and former professional fur thief. He was usually planted on the steps of the post office spinning yarns, but he also peddled real estate in his spare time. Dorothy hit it off with the Irishman at once.
For the next few days, the Perelmans accompanied the Campbells on a tour of local farms for sale. The second property Boyle showed them turned out to be an extremely handsome Pennsylvania Dutch house in Pipersville. Set back from the main road, reached by a long, scenic lane that guaranteed complete privacy, the fieldstone house sat on 111 acres of land that boasted a panoramic view of the Delaware River valley. Boyle called the place Fox House, named he said for a family who had owned it since the Revolutionary War. Three maples shaded the fourteen-room house on the north side, an apple orchard luxuriated on the south, and about fifty yards away stood an immense stone barn. When Boyle announced an asking price of only forty-five hundred dollars, it seemed past belief and everybody’s eyes widened. Sid Perelman declared that if the Campbells hesitated, he and Laura would certainly scoop up the house themselves.
Boyle raised a warning hand. They should see the inside of the house first, he told them, because it needed a little work.
It did indeed. Poultry feathers and cobwebs blanketed the interior. The ceilings dripped plaster stalactites, and the woodwork crumbled beneath their touch. There was no cellar, and what remained of the rotting floors was carpeted with dead chickens—“not still corpses, not yet skeletons,” Dorothy recalled. Most incredible of all, people were actually living there, an elderly Lithuanian couple who had established a rent-free colony a number of years ago and had been eking out a living cultivating a few fields and raising chickens. They did not welcome the appearance of potential buyers.
Dorothy and Alan, taking action forthwith, moved into a room at the Water Wheel Tavern and prepared to devote the remainder of the summer to buying and restoring Fox House.
In August, a reporter for the Doylestown Intelligencer stopped by the bar at the Water Wheel and asked the waitress if any celebrities had checked in. None that she knew of, she replied, but they did have a couple named Campbell, and Mrs. Campbell received mail addressed to Dorothy Parker. When Lester Trauch called to request an interview, Dorothy and Alan invited him to join them for dinner at the inn. Trauch showed up with another reporter, his friend Grace Chandler. Entertaining the local press, Dorothy abstemiously limited herself to one old-fashioned before dinner and a single brandy afterward. Alan turned on his full charm when he learned that Trauch, a theater lover, had enjoyed Alan’s performance in Design for Living. He was terribly pleased to find a fan in the Pennsylvania boondocks. Running through Trauch’s mind was what an odd couple the Campbells made. Alan, lithe as a dancer, appeared so much younger than Dorothy that “they might have been mother and son.”
It became clear that buying the farm was going to be a lot more difficult than Dorothy and Alan had expected. Tom and John Ross, the legal firm they had retained to handle the closing, were having trouble with the Lithuanians. Even though they had been given notice to vacate the premises, they seemed strenuously determined to keep the Campbells out. They dramatized their protests by draping across the threshold of the front door the body of a dead groundhog. “It was August weather,” Dorothy remembered, “and the groundhog had not too recently passed on.” The squatters’ delaying tactics angered Alan so greatly that he complained to Jack Boyle, who advised patience and reminded him that the old people had standing crops to harvest and chickens to ready for market.
“That’s their problem,” Alan said stubbornly. “Don’t they realize it’s costing Dottie and me seven hundred and fifty dollars a week to stay away from Hollywood?”
Actually, it was costing double that figure but fifteen hundred dollars a week would have been even less comprehensible to the Lithuanians, or to any of the Bucks County farmers for that matter.
After retaining an architect to proceed with the alterations, they decided to stay in the area to keep an eye on the work. Alan was growing restless at the Water Wheel, their room having become cramped because both of them had a habit of piling up books and magazines on the floor. Just as the room was beginning to resemble the basement of a public library and the maid was complaining about the impossibility of cleaning, the owner of the Cuttalossa Inn near Lumberville proposed closing his establishment to the public and renting the entire quarters to the Campbells. It seemed like an ideal solution, but the natives were appalled. “It was the Depression,” said Lester Trauch, “and they must have been paying enough rent so that the Cuttalossa didn’t need any other business. People thought this was insane. We didn’t know exactly how much rent the Campbells were paying, but whatever it was seemed outrageous in our eyes.”
In the middle of September, after an absence of three months, they left Fox House in the hands of a crew of workmen and raced back to the Coast by plane, the first of many such cross-country air trips. They were due to begin work at Selznick International on a picture that would be, they were told, a tragedy. This was unusual. During their two years in the business almost every one of their assignments had been a comedy, hardly surprising, for during the Depression comedies had become Hollywood’s forte. Operating on the theory that people out of work would not pay to see movies about people out of work, studios were usually careful to portray a fantasy world devoid of economic hardship. Even when a serious property was purchased, it somehow wound up on the screen thoroughly fumigated of anything that might kindle a thought or resemble a message. Employed solely for her wit, Dorothy was constantly typecast by producers and accepted the fact that she would probably never be invited to work on serious features. However, this was about to change.
She did not expect much from David Selznick, the dictatorial thirty-four-year-old studio head. One of Hollywood’s self-important young Turks, as recently as 1934 he had been kicking around MGM and RKO before forming his own independent company. His track record was not particularly impressive and he was hoping to recoup some of his losses with a film about Hollywood, a subject he believed the whole world found as fascinating as he did. The trouble with previous pictures on the subject, he decided, was a lack of credibility. Basing his idea for a plot on a 1932 film, What Price Hollywood?, he visualized a movie about a determined young woman, a country bumpkin, who turns up in Hollywood to break into pictures and marries a famous movie idol. The twist is that his career begins to nose-dive just as hers is ascending, until eventually the husband, an alcoholic has-been, feels there is no alternative except to swim out to sea toward the sunset. Although Selznick considered himself a gifted screenwriter and certainly the author of this tale, he believed that it would be unwise to give himself the credit for reasons of policy. Robert Carson and William Wellman developed a screenplay, as yet untitled. Selznick signed Dorothy and Alan as a second team to rewrite the script and beef up the final dialogue. In fact, he took no writer’s contribution very seriously.
On her arrival in Hollywood in 1934, Dorothy had made an important discovery. Everybody seemed to believe they were writers. Guards at the studio gates expounded story ideas and messenger boys bearing interoffice memos felt no qualms about suggesting dialogue. The worst offenders in this respect were producers. Evidently, Selznick believed that a film was capable of writing itself. Some years later, he openly discounted the efforts of Dorothy and Alan, as well as Carson and director William Wellman, by insisting that ninety-five percent of the dialogue in A Star Is Born “was actually straight out of life and was straight ‘reportage,’ so to speak.” That autumn he irritated Dorothy with his habit of flapping into her office around six o’clock, just as she and Alan were preparing to go home. They would spring to attention while he rejected their handiwork by beginning, “No, not this,” and then they would be compelled to stay late changing it. Equally irksome were the afternoons when he would march in with a page of dialogue he had composed and fling it on her desk.
The following spring, the Campbells went to see A Star Is Born when it opened at Radio City Music Hall. They apparently were pleased with their work because in an interview, Dorothy pointed proudly to the script as an example of the progress Hollywood was making in respect to realism. She said happily that producers were discovering “that people, once given the chance, would be as partial to good pictures as they once were to bad ones.”
Upon reflection, she felt that she had contributed nothing of significance to Selznick’s Technicolor opus, which may account for her subsequent negativity when she expressed surprise that anyone considered A Star Is Born a memorable picture. She also liked to pretend that she had never seen the entire film: “I went to see it, all alone, for a few minutes, and I came out, all alone.” Dorothy and Alan, with Robert Carson, were nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay, but they failed to win (the award went to the writers of The Life of Emile Zola). Carson and Wellman picked up the film’s only Oscar for Best Original Story. At the Oscar presentations, Wellman accepted the award and then rendered homage by marching it straight over to Selznick: “Take it, you had more to do with winning it than I did.”
All the while, Dorothy and Alan, busy nesting, had their minds elsewhere. Rebuilding the farmhouse was exciting, and they devoted so many hours to studying blueprints that Alan later used them to paper a wall in the upstairs hall. They spent a great deal of time toying with color schemes, leafing transfixed through endless catalogues full of furniture, hardware, and Early American accessories. They intended the completed Fox House to be a dream.
Another dream also seemed to be coming true that autumn. At the age of forty-three, Dorothy found herself pregnant. It looked as if a totally new phase of her life was about to begin. Over the years she had expressed her longing to “have babies,” as she put it. She and Alan were jubilant and regarded her conception as a miracle, but anxiety about her chances for carrying a baby to term made them cautious about announcing the news. Privately, she talked about little else and began to knit baby clothes.
Once she passed the first trimester in December and revealed her pregnancy to friends, she developed a baby mania. She was soon beleaguered with requests for interviews and photographs. In response to a query from Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons, she and Alan wired: HOW DID YOU KNOW BEFORE WE DID? DOCTOR SAID SOMETIME IN JUNE. Some of her friends regarded this publicity as inappropriate. Frances Goodrich had known Dorothy in New York before she and husband Albert Hackett arrived at MGM to write the Thin Man films. Goodrich found Dorothy’s behavior pathetic:
When she knew she was pregnant, she called up Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons to give them the scoop. In God’s name! Dottie Parker announcing she’s going to have a baby when she’s forty-five or something, nature’s last attempt. And knitting for the cameras!
Despite the love Dorothy routinely lavished on her dogs, few people could imagine her as a mother. “She was great with dogs,” said a friend. “A dog couldn’t talk back and couldn’t top her jokes. But I thought she would grow very bored with motherhood. She didn’t have the staying power.” Another skeptic questioned whether it was possible for her “to have anything in common with children because they didn’t drink.” There were jocose predictions that the baby, accustomed to imbibing in utero a liquid diet of martinis and French brandy, would emerge tight and need a cup of coffee. Nobody doubted that Alan would make an exceptional father because his rapport with children was plain to see. Thomas Guinzburg has vivid recollections from his childhood of the Campbells’ visiting his parents. He remembers Alan’s extraordinary ease with himself and his sister, his sense of fun and mischief, and how ready he was for a romp. “He would be with us in the kitchen, shooting with a water pistol and spraying the cook, and I thought I’d get blamed.” Dorothy remained in the drawing room.
“Oh my,” Guinzburg once overhead her say, “if only the Guinzburg children were as well behaved as the Guinzburg dogs.”
They flew to New York for the Christmas holidays. Even though no sign whatever of trouble had arisen thus far, sometime during the week between Christmas and New Year she miscarried. Her physical recovery was fairly rapid, because less than two weeks later she attended a birthday tea at Adele Lovett’s home, where she partied with Marc Connelly, John O’Hara, and Averell Harriman. Dick Myers wrote to his wife Alice Lee that she was “looking well after her mishap.” She managed to contain her feelings, deliberately minimizing the seriousness of the loss to her friends. During her New York stay, the Murphys were in Saranac Lake, New York, where Patrick had taken a turn for the worse. He died at the end of January, after an eight-year battle with tuberculosis.
When faced with loss in the past, her typical response had been an attempt at self-destruction or a major depression, followed by efforts to survive by literary description. Now the situation was different. She had grown immeasurably stronger during her marriage. She had felt no suicidal impulses for several years—and Alan was there to offer comfort. Following the standard advice given in the case of failed pregnancies, she did her best to forget the incident as quickly as possible by getting pregnant again. After returning to California, she began infertility tests. During that winter, mourning one pregnancy and trying to achieve another, she worked on a second Selznick comedy, Nothing Sacred, and did her best to produce amusing dialogue.
By spring, Fox House was finally ready for occupancy. A new cellar, a well, and electricity had been installed. They did not have a telephone because the phone company was asking three thousand dollars to bring in the lines to Pipersville, charges Dorothy and Alan considered prohibitive. They decided it would be refreshing to live “sweet and peaceful and sequestered.” The task of transforming the place into a home was left to Alan, but Dorothy agreed with his plan to pass up safe neutral tints in favor of a variety of styles and colors. The result was an unusual mixture of Colonial, Empire, and Victorian, with a few advanced touches such as indirect lighting, a style local wits derided as Pipersville Modern. Alan’s efforts delighted her but were judged to be in impossibly bad taste by some of their friends, who were swift to voice their opinions. Dorothy later excused his excesses by claiming that the interior design was a deliberate protest against the theory that present-day country dwellers ought to live like Early Americans.
The house looked extremely cheerful and felt comfortable. The living room contained ten shades of red, including shrimp walls, Chinese red carpeting, and a wing chair upholstered in pink chintz with a large floral pattern. It was like sitting in the middle of a bowl of cherry Jell-O, but Dorothy admired the room and decided that the rosy tones made her look younger. The master bedroom was painted deep marine blue, a spacious dressing room was built, and space made for three dog beds so that a few of their nine animals could always sleep with them. Alan’s piece de résisance was lining the deeply recessed windows in the dining room with sheets of mirror to reflect the orchard beyond. Dorothy loved the idea but visitors rolled up their eyes at each other. They believed that Alan had ruined the old windows.
Having decorated the interior without making concessions to Bucks County custom, the Campbells next set to work landscaping the grounds. Near the house stood a grove of trees, “a clump of sickly, straggly maples” as Dorothy described them, that blocked her view of the meadows. With little thought to the matter, she and Alan had the trees chopped down. When word of this desecration circulated among their writing friends, everyone expressed horror. Fifty years later, the cutting of the trees still had not been forgotten. Writer Joseph Schrank observed, “They weren’t content to citify the house, but then they started cutting down trees. It was terrible. Dottie didn’t give a damn, but the writers out there were incensed, and I remember how one playwright swore he was going to write a play about it.”
Dorothy found the fuss incomprehensible. “Fifty-second Street Thoreaus,” she sniffed.
Sid Perelman gazed out over the spot where the offending maples had once stood. “You must have needed the wood pretty bad,” he told her.
This was the last straw. Indignant, she banned the Perelmans from Fox House for a time.
Several years later, she got her revenge on Bucks County tree lovers. At a cost of nearly thirty-five thousand dollars, Moss Hart had transformed his New Hope estate practically overnight by planting thousands of pines, elms, and maples, but Dorothy remained unimpressed. When she saw the trees, she said that it only showed what God could do if He had money.
Their first months in Fox House was a period of exceptional contentment. Alan’s homemaking pleased Dorothy. She was particularly delighted with the stone statue of Bacchus that he bought for the garden, and she also admired his cleverness with tools. After she complained about the long trip between the porch and the kitchen—she had to walk the entire length of the house for a drink—he built a chest to hold bottles, glasses, and an ice bucket. It was laboriously decorated with scrolls and colored flowers, but what made it truly beautiful was the love that had gone into it.
It turned out that owning a country place was a little more complicated than they had anticipated. Hiring a man to handle the farm work was not a problem. He moved into the barn apartment with his family and planted their acreage with fodder corn, oats, and soybeans, as the government directed. Besides ploughing, harvesting, and functioning as gardener and handyman, Hiram Beer looked after the car and fed the animals. They were not so fortunate with other servants, despite Alan’s boast when they first bought the farm that people could always be found to run it—not in Bucks County, a community of mainly farmers. A succession of imported live-in couples began—none of them stuck around for long. In time, Alan was compelled to bring a man from Richmond to drive the Packard. He was, Joseph Schrank recalled, “the only black uniformed chauffeur I ever remember seeing in Bucks County.”
In Alan’s capable hands, Fox House operated efficiently, at least most of the time. Dorothy had little interest in the household, nor did she even spend much time out of doors. She claimed that she loved the idea of gardening—in theory. The truth was, she left it to Hiram Beer. “I’m awfully lazy about it—and the weeds are so much quicker than I am.” Like the dogs, who were confused by the farm and needed coaxing to venture out to the porch, she remained at heart a city person who always found nature an acquired taste. Her idea of country life was sleeping until mid-afternoon, then spending a few hours reading, knitting, or chainsmoking until it was time to dress for dinner. Sometimes the chauffeur would run her into Frenchtown, New Jersey, the nearest town of any size, to visit her hairdresser, but Mary McDonald did not mind driving out to the farm to do her nails and hair.
Much of their social life was with the Perelmans, whose house was located in Erwinna, and with Ruth and Augustus Goetz who lived in nearby Keller’s Church. [Gus Goetz was an ex-stockbroker. Several years later the Goetzes became playwrights with successful dramatic collaborations such as The Heiress and The Immoralist. ] When it was the Campbells’ turn to entertain, their dinner parties ran along predictable lines. Meals were served quite late, sometimes before 11:00 P.M. but more frequently later, because Dorothy enjoyed a lengthy cocktail hour. Ruth Goetz noticed that “she drank her martinis with real thirst, as if she were having ice tea on a hot day.”
As the evening wore on, Alan would dance back and forth to the kitchen, where the cook was marking the time, which was transforming her meal into a blackened mess. Dorothy never ventured into the kitchen. When the dinner could be delayed no longer, she strolled into the dining room as if she were as much a guest in the house as the Goetzes or the Perelmans. By this time, everyone was so inebriated that no one cared about the meal.
At her hungriest, Dorothy managed only slight interest in food. When the Campbells were invited out, she always got down a little of anything put before her and, like a mannerly child, made a point of whispering, “Oh, that’s lovely.” Said Ruth Goetz, “She overthanked you when she arrived and overthanked you when she left.” At Fox House, if Alan happened to be absent or the cook had quit, Dorothy didn’t eat.
Houseworkers constantly disappeared. “It was the weird hours,” Roy Eichel guessed. “Dottie and Alan went to bed half-drunk at four in the morning and then slept until the next afternoon. They expected their help to stay up till dawn cleaning up and then to be awake whenever they got up. They had a terrible time keeping people because nobody wanted to live like that.” It was not unusual for weekend guests to come downstairs on Sunday morning and find the cook gone. Before they knew it, they were preparing their own breakfast and Dorothy’s as well.
In the winter of 1936, during a brief trip to New York, Dorothy met Alan’s mother, who had come up from Virginia. Horte Campbell was outraged over her son’s marriage to a woman only twelve years younger than herself. As Marc Connelly remembered, she was so mad “about his marrying this horrible creature that her southern pride near could have blown up the entire United States,” and he watched “the little forks coming out of Horte’s eyes” whenever she looked at her daughter-in-law. Throughout the visit, which Dorothy likened to “a cycle of Cathay,” Horte kept muttering that the rigorous climate was killing her. The other Mrs. Campbell also took pleasure in calling attention to her daughter-in-law’s age by addressing her, sweetly, as “my little daughter.” Dorothy put up a show of cordiality while privately gnashing her teeth and mocking Horte’s southern accent, saying that she was the only woman alive who pronounced the word egg as if it had three syllables.
After they moved to Bucks County, Horte complained of feeling lonely in Richmond and insisted she could be helpful to Dorothy and Alan if she were to live at the farm. It was not hard to figure out what was on her mind. She schemed to stay in the house during their absence once when they flew back to Hollywood for an assignment. Dorothy said, only half-jokingly, “She fired our farmer—and oh boy, are they hard to replace—fired our servants, and set fire to the drawing room.” To ward off further trouble, she proposed buying Horte a house of her own in Bucks County, which at least would prevent her from camping at the farm. In time, a cottage was found a few miles away in Point Pleasant. It was a modest house compared to Fox House, but otherwise perfectly suitable for a single person. Horte felt it lacked grandeur and enjoyed referring to it as her “rotten lil ole shayukah,” pronouncing shack in three syllables. Dorothy fumed, “The fact that Alan and I bought her the ‘shayukah’ at great expense, and kept it going at greater, means nothing.”
Nor did the gift of the house solve the problem of Horte’s interference in their lives. Quite the opposite: Living nearby merely enabled her to drop in whenever she liked, although in the winter she usually returned to Virginia. Her presence sometimes annoyed Alan more than Dorothy. Lillian Hellman and Dorothy were once knitting before the living room fireplace while Alan and his mother were upstairs quarreling. As the afternoon wore on, it began to snow, and Dorothy heaped more wood on the fire until it was built high. The silence in the room was broken only by bloodcurdling shouts and recriminations that drifted down from the second floor. Dorothy sighed but made no comment. Suddenly, the racket stopped and Alan came pounding down the stairs. When he appeared in the living room, he immediately began to vent his anger on their fire.
“It’s as hot as hell in here,” he said balefully.
“Not for orphans,” Dorothy replied.
One morning a young man knocked at the back door of Ruth Goetz’s house in Keller’s Church. He introduced himself as a Communist Party organizer for Bucks County, who had got her name from the rolls of the New York office. “From now on,” he told her, “you’ll be paying your dues to me every month.” After she handed over her fifty cents, he asked directions to Pipersville, specifically to Fox House. Until then, Ruth was unaware of Dorothy’s connection with the C.P.
Subsequently, the same young man appeared regularly in the neighborhood to collect dues and to conduct informal meetings. Usually the group consisted of Dorothy and Ruth with their husbands, who, Ruth recalled, “looked upon us as if we were mad women. Alan was absolutely agreeable and Gus always said, ‘Well, if that’s the way you feel—’ We believed there was a war coming, and we were all very concerned about politics at that time.” Sometimes Sid and Laura Perelman appeared but from no particular desire to study Marxism. Laura, open-minded about the subject, indicated willingness to learn, but Sid was very apparently bored.
Ruth Goetz believed that Dorothy’s allegiance to the C.P. lasted about two years. She recalled a particular meeting when “this poor inexperienced boy thought he was going to have a grouping of the faithful for his lecture on Karl Marx. It turned out to be a slim evening for him, because we all asked difficult questions.” Long before Stalin drew up his nonaggression pact with Hitler in 1939, she was busy knitting socks for the British army. Dorothy also carried a knitting bag, said Goetz. “We both were knitting for England. Our affiliation with the Party was over.”
Dorothy did not, in fact, share Ruth Goetz’s disgust about Stalin’s purge of his political enemies. Dorothy endorsed the verdicts. In April 1938, she and Alan were among one hundred and fifty American artists and educators who signed a statement declaring that the evidence presented during the Moscow trials established “a clear presumption of the guilt of the defendants.” Furthermore, the signers urged support for the Soviet Union, because it was struggling to free itself from “insidious internal dangers.”
It is impossible to determine the degree of Dorothy’s involvement with the Communist Party. A number of her nonpolitical friends were convinced of her membership, for no better reason than she subscribed to the Moscow News. Ring Lardner, Jr., a member of the C.P.’s Hollywood section, recalled that she and Alan joined together. “It was quite brief. They belonged to a special group that was sheltered [by the Party] and kept away from meetings. Shortly afterward, they went off to Paris. I don’t think they picked up the membership after they came back to Hollywood.” Writer Budd Schulberg, he said, “recruited them.”
Schulberg, another Hollywood Party member in the late thirties, said that he did not remember specifically recruiting Dorothy nor did he know for certain that she was a member. “Everyone at that time knew she was sympathetic,” he said. He added that “there were people who made contributions without actually joining. There was a gray area.”
There was no doubt about her feelings. She believed that Communism was the great crusade of her time, the U.S. Communist Party the one movement from which great deeds might emerge, the only political party where there was love, even rapture, to be got and given. She was vulnerable to such systems. During the 1930s, she lent the Party the prestige of her name. She joined more than thirty organizations, including the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the League of Women Shoppers, and the International Workers Order. She contributed money to these organizations, which would later be described as Communist fronts, and permitted them to list her as a sponsor on their letterheads and fund-raising appeals. She was convinced they were worthy causes. It never occurred to her to ask probing questions about their origins or how the collected money was actually spent.
While there is much to suggest that she joined the Communist Party, there is no conclusive evidence to prove that she actually did so. Some claim that she became a secret member, and it is easy to imagine how enticing she would have found such an idea. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation subsequently attempted to establish her membership, their efforts failed. In 1947, reviewing its files on her, the Bureau put together a nineteen-page memorandum that summarized her activities during the previous decade. After a biographical blurb taken from Who’s Who in America and a list of her publications, also copied verbatim from Who’s Who, the memo went on to address the subject, “Evidence of Communist Party Membership and Affiliation.” The following six pieces of evidence were presented:
On May 6, 1937, an anonymous outside source advised that Dorothy Parker was among those who had contributed to the Communist Movement.
A report received by the Bureau from G-2, dated October 23, 1940, described Dorothy Parker as a Communist Party member, writer for New Masses, member of the “Stinkers Committee,” and a signer of the “Let Stalin Alone” letter.
Time Magazine in its publication of January 6, 1941, in an article on “The Revolt of the Intellectuals,” described Dorothy Parker as an ally of the Communists in 1938 although not a Communist herself. She was called a fellow traveler who wanted to help fight Fascism.
The Washington Times Herald of September 8, 1941, carried an article saying that Congressman Martin Dies had accused Leon Henderson, director of the Office of Price Administration, of being a Communist. He referred to Henderson’s argument with a photographer at his home when the photographer tried to take a photograph of a nationally prominent Communist. The article said that Henderson identified the Communist as being Dorothy Parker. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxx1said that he had been advised byxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxx1 that Dorothy Parker had broken all her ties with the Communist Party. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.1
Nineteen forty-seven, the year that this memo was compiled, was a dangerous time for those holding leftist beliefs. Membership in a list of supposedly subversive organizations drawn up by the Attorney General’s office branded people disloyal and therefore unemployable. In Hollywood, the film industry quaked when Congressman J. Parnell Thomas served forty-five actors, writers, and directors with subpoenas commanding their presence before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Of this number, nineteen unfriendly witnesses—quickly labeled the Hollywood Nineteen—refused to cooperate. Ten who were eventually cited for contempt of Congress served prison terms.
Lillian Hellman provided an account of Dorothy’s experience with HUAC in her memoirs. She claimed that when the subpoena arrived, she offered to accompany her to the hearing. Dorothy looked puzzled and asked “Why, Lilly?” Hellman interpreted this to mean that she regarded the ruling classes as nothing more than people who had more money than she did. Hellman went on to commend Dorothy’s hauteur before the Committee, as if she were telling them, “Yes, dear, it’s true that I’m here to observe you, but I do not like you and will, of course, say and write exactly that.”
As with so many of Lillian Hellman’s memories, this simply was not true. Dorothy was not among those who received a pink slip in 1947, nor was she summoned as a witness in the HUAC hearings during the early fifties, because the government must have known that it had a weak case. Dorothy herself made two rather emphatic statements on the subject. In 1937, she wrote that she belonged to no political party, her only group affiliation having been with “that not especially brave little band that hid its nakedness of heart and mind under the out-of-date garment of a sense of humor.” Fourteen years later, she denied having ever been a Party member, although it is easy to understand that the circumstances under which she made the statement might have warranted the stretching of the truth.
In 1937, after the Communist Party decided to form alliances with nonrevolutionary groups like the Democratic party, Hollywood began to resemble a tropical rain forest that teemed with lush varieties of political ideologies and activities. In this steamy atmosphere of the Popular Front, the distinctions between Communism and home-grown American liberalism tended to blur.
An interesting paradox began to develop in the C.P. On the one hand, it was a fairly accessible organization—all that was required to obtain information was listening. Even the indifferent—and Dorothy was far from indifferent—had difficulty avoiding both the C.P. gospel and C.P. members. All over town they could be encountered at Chasen’s or Screen Writers Guild meetings or the studio commissaries.
At the same time, an air of secrecy had grown up around the Hollywood C.P. Chiefly, this seems to have been a result of the Party’s doctrine of expediency—the notion that there was little to gain if they frightened the people they wanted to influence by waving radical ideas under their noses. As C.P. functionaries have since explained, it was standard procedure for Party members active in politics or union organizing, particularly in the Screen Writers Guild, to avoid open participaton in Party work. Contributing to the secrecy was the fact that the Hollywood C.P. did not issue membership cards. Ring Lardner, Jr., later stated that the organizatonal secretary probably kept a list of members in order to record dues payments, but most likely even that used pseudonyms or partial names. Lardner and Dalton Trumbo ridiculed the C.P. cards reading “Ring L.” and “Dalt T.” that HUAC produced at the 1947 hearings of the Hollywood Ten.
The fact that some found the melodrama of belonging to a secret society appealing does not seem remarkable in an industry whose product was fantasy. Ring Lardner recalled that during telephone conversations he made from his MGM office, he referred to Party meetings as poker games. Meetings were generally sheltered events held in private homes, where people sat around with drinks in their hands, so that the gathering would look like a cocktail party if an outsider happened to barge in. One writer stashed his library of Marxist literature in a secret compartment of his bar. Others concealed their political activities from wives or lovers. Lillian Hellman wrote that, despite her attendance at three or four C.P. gatherings with Dashiell Hammett, with whom she was living at the time, he never divulged whether or not he was a member. She suspected that he joined in 1937 or 1938, but she never asked “and if I had asked would not have been answered,” a state of affairs that she attributed to the peculiar nature of their relationship.
The main person to connect Dorothy with being a secret member of the Party was Martin Berkeley, an ex-Communist screenwriter (My Friend Flicka) who appeared as a cooperative witness before HUAC in 1951 and managed to win a good deal of publicity by naming 158 individuals whom he claimed had been C.P. members in the thirties. Berkeley testified that he knew exactly when—mid-June 1937—the Hollywood section of the Party had been organized because it had taken place at his home, since his place had a big living room and ample parking facilities. Among those who showed up, he said, were five prominent writers: Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, Donald Ogden Stewart, Lillian Hellman, and Dashiell Hammett. He went on to say that after the meeting at his house he never saw any of those five writers again. Curious, he asked his Party superior about their whereabouts and was told they had been assigned to a group known as “party members at large,” that he had seen the last of them as far as organizational meetings were concerned. A member at large, Berkeley explained to the Committee, meant that “you are pretty important and you don’t want to be exposed.” It was his guess that the important writers had ended up meeting secretly with Party functionaries like John Howard Lawson or V. J. Jerome to receive instructions but otherwise had no contact, for their own protection as well as for that of the Party.
Accusations such as Berkeley’s destroyed Dorothy’s career during the fifties. Unable to find work as a screenwriter, she paid dearly for her transgressions, real or invented, but she never called attention to her plight, never singled herself out as exceptional or in any way worthy of admiration, in contrast to Lillian Hellman who felt compelled to exalt her behavior. Dorothy declined to speak of her politics, past or present. When an interviewer once tried to question her about the political consciousness in Hollywood during the 1930s, she affected not to understand the question. “I haven’t the faintest idea about the politics of Hollywood, and you make me laugh when you speak of them.”
Living in Pennsylvania and working in California meant the expense of supporting two establishments, but the money continued to roll in. In May 1937, Dorothy and Alan signed a five-year contract with Samuel Goldwyn at a combined weekly salary of fifty-two hundred dollars. The new contract was respectfully reported by the press, for that amount was remarkable by anyone’s standards and close to the upper limit of salaries being paid to screenwriters. Returning to Hollywood on June 7, they moved into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where Alan abruptly—and inexplicably—began to institute economies. Contending that the hotel was expensive and noisy, he rented a house in Beverly Hills and hired a single servant. This about-face toward spartan living failed to please him either. He described their new quarters at 710 North Linden Drive as “hideous.”
At first they liked the studio. As the name plates on the doors of the Writers’ Building attested, Sam Goldwyn made a practice of hiring top-quality writers. In the office next to theirs was their friend Lillian Hellman.
The picture that Dorothy and Alan had been signed to work on was called The Cowboy and the Lady, a romantic comedy intended for Merle Oberon and Gary Cooper. It had already run through several titles and an equal number of writers, including Anita Loos and John Emerson, but the Campbells were entrusted with writing the final draft. They soon discovered that while Goldwyn wanted only the most important writers, his disregard for their work was no different than other Hollywood producers’. When the new script failed to satisfy him, they were yanked off the project and reassigned to The Goldwyn Follies, a musical blockbuster that was to make use of beautiful women, outstanding comics, Gershwin music and lyrics, and George Balanchine dances. All that it lacked was a decent script. Once again a band of writers had preceded Dorothy and Alan, who, remembering their fifty-two hundred a week, struggled to devise still another version. While Goldwyn seemed pleased, he thought it could use a fresher finish and eventually showed their draft to Ben Hecht, who talked him out of it and into a completely new one written by himself. When The Goldwyn Follies did poorly, Dorothy and Alan cackled with glee. Hecht had claimed the sole writing credit for himself.
Finally, Goldwyn shifted them to another project that had been worked over by practically every writer on the lot. You Can Be Beautiful was supposed to tell the story of an entrepreneur like Elizabeth Arden or Helena Rubenstein, a woman who revolutionizes the beauty business. For the movies, she had to be beautiful and happy. When Dorothy was asked for a new twist, she proposed making the heroine plain as a pancake, a contented duckling who is transformed into an unhappy beauty. Garson Kanin remembered Goldwyn’s reaction:
“God damn it, Dottie!” he thundered. “You and your God damn sophisticated jokes. You’re a great writer. You’re a great poet.” He paused, frowning in an effort to recall something. He quoted, “ ‘Men never make a pass at girls wearing eyeglasses.’ That’s a great poem and you wrote it. You’re a great wit. You’re a great woman, but you haven’t got a great audience and you know why? Because you don’t want to give people what they want.”
Dorothy’s wide, innocent face looked up at him. “But Mr. Goldwyn,” she said softly, “people don’t know what they want until you give it to them.”
“You see that?” said Goldwyn to the world. “You just did it again. Wisecracks. I told you there’s no money in wisecracks. People want a happy ending.”
Dottie rose. “I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn,” she said, “but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.”
She left the room.
Goldwyn surveyed those of us who remained. “Does anybody in here know what the hell that woman was talking about?”
No doubt they did but nobody dared try to explain it.
Back in the summer of 1936, the Screen Writers Guild had disbanded, but it looked as if it was about to rise phoenix-like from its ashes. Dorothy threw herself wholeheartedly into making sure it did. Even though the studios believed the Guild had died, a handful of people had kept it alive for the past year by meetings at private homes, Dorothy and Alan’s among them. An unpublished poem Dorothy wrote during the days of clandestine organizing was titled “The Passionate Screen Writer To His Love.” Its opening stanza provoked grins among screenwriters in 1937 and Marc Connelly carefully preserved it among his papers:
Oh come, my love, and join with me
The oldest infant industry.
Come seek the bourne of palm and pearl,
The lovely land of Boy-Meets-Girl,
Come grace this lotus-laden shore,
This Isle of Do-What’s-Done-Before.
Come, curb the new, and watch the old win,
Out where the streets are paved with Goldwyn.
The Guild had been waiting for a favorable ruling by the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the Wagner Act. When this happened on April 12, the Guild lost no time in drafting a petition for a National Labor Relations Board hearing. The studios had insisted all along that writers were artists, therefore ineligible to unionize. The hearing would be a test case to see whether or not writers could be considered labor.
Less than two weeks after Dorothy’s return to Hollywood, the Guild held its first open meeting at the Hollywood Athletic Club. More than four hundred writers showed up. Despite Red-baiting charges that the Communists were responsible for reforming the Guild, the slate of officers and board members elected that evening demonstrated a nice balance between conservatives, liberal Democrats, and those known to be left-wingers. Dorothy was elected to the board.
The union organizing went on for more than a year until the National Labor Relations Board ruled in June 1938 that screenwriters did indeed qualify as workers under the Wagner Act. A certification election held that same month allowed them to choose either the Screen Writers Guild or the more conservative Screen Playwrights as their representative. The Screen Writers Guild won by a vote of more than four to one.
Though the Guild did not win its first contract until 1941, nine years after the organizing had begun, the battle had been won. Dorothy thought that “the bravest, proudest word in all the dictionaries” was organize, but she was realistic enough to believe “that if a screenwriter had his name across the Capital Theatre in red, white, and blue letters fifty feet tall, he’d still be anonymous.”