Chapter 14
1937-1941
Hollywood offered an uncommonly rich lode of raw material for satire. Although Dorothy loathed the place, she was unable to write anything about it. Instead, she merely looked on while friends published their observations in books for which she often composed laudatory reviews. Nathanael West finished The Day of the Locust, Budd Schulberg wrote What Makes Sammy Run?, and Sid Perelman reeled out sulfurous pieces ridiculing the movie titans who “forgather in their knotty-pine libraries beside the murmurous Pacific” while cigar smoke “wreathes their Renoirs.” Scott Fitzgerald, who was eventually inspired to write The Last Tycoon about the legendary Irving Thalberg, arrived in Hollywood during the summer of 1937. Seeing him again triggered Dorothy’s guilt about abandoning her fiction writing.
Dorothy’s former drinking companion looked pale and his hair had begun to thin, but he was unquestionably functional. He explained with great pride that he had been on the wagon for ten months. He moved into the Garden of Allah, where he lived chastely and consumed huge quantities of Coca-Cola. Scott was struggling to deal with serious troubles. Zelda had been diagnosed as incurable and would probably remain hospitalized for the rest of her life. Since he was barely earning a living lately, he was delighted when his agent secured him a six-month contract at MGM, where he was to be paid a thousand dollars a week.
Dorothy tried to head off his reproaches about her lack of productivity by taking the offensive and warning him that screen writing was exhausting work. When she spoke about the impossibility of serving two masters, Fitzgerald scoffed and retorted that he planned to get up early and write before reporting to MGM. He wrote to Max Perkins that Dorothy’s trouble was laziness. What he failed to realize was how much of her energy was directed into the Communist Party and the Screen Writers Guild. What he did know of these activities only made him suspicious. Having always found her basically self-concerned—a “spoiled” writer, he said—he did not believe that her conversion to Communism had any effect on her “supremely indifferent” attitude toward others.
Dorothy sought to lure Fitzgerald into radical politics by inviting him to social-cum-political functions. One of the memorable events of that summer was Ernest Hemingway’s arrival in July with a documentary film about the Spanish war. Dorothy made sure that Scott was invited to the private benefit screening at the home of Fredric March. The politically concerned element in the movie business turned out in force to see The Spanish Earth, a film that Hemingway had shot with Dutch director Joris Ivens and for which he also had written and recorded the narration. Frankly partisan in its support of the Spanish Republic, it demonstrated the anguish of the people and the way that war had affected their lives. After a screening at the White House for the Roosevelts, Hemingway was now hoping to obtain commercial distribution by one of the major studios as well as contributions for the purchase of ambulances. He promised that a donation of one thousand dollars would put an ambulance in action at the front in only four weeks. Dorothy, who had invested five hundred dollars in the film, was one of the few guests to buy an entire ambulance.
Lillian Hellman later wrote that after the screening Dorothy and Alan invited Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and a number of other friends to their house for a nightcap. According to Hellman, she accepted the offer of a lift from Fitzgerald, whom she described as acutely melancholy, perhaps even suffering delirium tremens, because he drove along at ten miles an hour with his hands trembling on the wheel. Pulling up at Dorothy’s house, he expressed fear about going in because he was on the wagon and terrified of Hemingway. “It’s a long story, Ernest and me,” Hellman reported him as saying. She replied that he mustn’t be afraid. They entered the house hand in hand at the precise moment that Hemingway, who was standing with his back to the door, decided to heave a highball glass against the stone fireplace. The sound of the smashing glass sent Fitzgerald into shell shock. Hellman shepherded him into the kitchen, where Dorothy and Alan were fixing drinks and Dashiell Hammett was getting drunk. Hellman recalls that her appeals to Hammett to help poor “Mr. Fitzgerald” proved useless and that Hammett remarked that Ernest had no gift for portraying women but only displayed them in his fiction in order to admire them, but she was unable to recall anything more about the evening. She and Scott never met again.
But this account is not true. Hellman herself wrote that she first met Hemingway in Paris a few months later, which is confirmed by the recollection of other individuals. Moreover, on the day of the screening, Hemingway and Fitzgerald had enjoyed a convivial luncheon together with Robert Benchley, who sent Gertrude a report of their reunion. There was no indication that this meeting was anything but warm and good-humored. The morning after The Spanish Earth was shown, Fitzgerald sent Hemingway a telegram of congratulations.
Not long after this, Dorothy’s proprietary interest in Scott’s political education came to an end. She invited him to a dinner dance sponsored by the Screen Writers Guild at the Coconut Grove nightclub. As organizer of the fund-raising dinner, she reserved a large table for her personal guests, including Scott, and danced often with him during the evening. When he was alone at the table, he noticed a pretty blonde nearby and began to cast admiring glances in her direction. This was Sheilah Graham, the reporter who had interviewed Dorothy about her tattoo, now an up-and-coming Hollywood gossip columnist. In Sheilah Graham, Scott would try to find a replacement for Zelda.
Dorothy and Alan made a precipitous and disgusted departure from Hollywood in early August. After two months of frustration, they learned that Sam Goldwyn was not planning to extend their option and that their ballyhooed five-year contract would yield only $52,000 instead of a projected $1.3 million. While they had not really counted on becoming millionaires, neither had they envisioned a mere ten weeks of employment for which they would receive not a single writing credit. They certainly did not expect to be cashiered without warning. Benchley told his wife, “Their jobs blew up.”
In a huff, Dorothy and Alan gave up the house on North Linden Drive and hurried back to Bucks County, where they planned to be farmers. A few days later, deciding that they deserved a holiday after the recent unpleasantness, they changed their minds and set off on a European vacation. Dorothy had not been abroad since 1932 and Alan had never been, so she was eager to conduct him around the sights. When they sailed for France aboard the Normandie on August 18, Lillian Hellman was with them.
On the boat they befriended Martha Gellhorn, a writer who was having an affair with Ernest Hemingway and who became his third wife after he divorced Pauline. The handsome, golden-haired Gellhorn had become involved with Hemingway while covering the war in Spain for Collier’s. They planned to meet in Paris before returning to Spain together. The Campbells hit it off immediately with Martha Gellhorn, even though her idea of shipboard fun was an energetic workout in the gymnasium. Dorothy would rather have eaten nails than exercise, but she admired Martha’s fitness and thought she was “truly fine—even leaving aside her looks and her spirit and her courage and her decency—though I can’t imagine why they should be shoved aside....” It turned out to be an unexpectedly enjoyable crossing, except for the pouting presence of Lillian Hellman who could not manage to conceal completely her jealousy of Gellhorn and later made catty remarks about “her well-tailored pants and good boots,” as if she were covering a war for Vogue.
Hellman, a difficult traveling companion under the best of circumstances, continued to dampen Dorothy and Alan’s gaiety once they reached Paris. She disliked Alan, whom she scorned as effete and affected. She attributed to Hemingway the remark that Alan treated his wife as if he were the manager of a champion prizefighter or movie star, a remark that may or may not be apocryphal, but one which perfectly reflected her own view of their marriage. Alan clearly worshiped Dorothy; he enjoyed ministering to her and actually sought opportunities to please her, traits conspicuously absent in Hellman’s own partner.
In Paris, crowded with visitors to the World Exhibition, they checked into the Hotel Meurice and plunged into a round of partying with Sara and Gerald Murphy, Alice Lee and Dick Myers, Janet Flanner, and Fernand Léger. One evening they had drinks with Hemingway. They also saw Ring Lardner’s son Jim, who wanted to enlist in the International Brigade and fight in Spain (where he was killed a few months later). Hellman tagged along, pretending to like the Murphys and trying to conceal her contempt for their manners and money. Alan tried to ignore Hellman’s animosity.
That summer in Paris, Dorothy was lionized everywhere she went. The rich and famous, Hellman recalled, “invited Dottie for dinners and country lunches and the tennis she didn’t play and the pools she didn’t swim in.” Although Hellman pretended to feel pleased when important people courted Dorothy, she was extremely jealous. Few had heard of her, nor did she have the personality or beauty to enchant them. She admitted that her own invitations were “second-class stuff compared to Dottie’s admirers.” In public, she expressed amusement at Dorothy’s excessively good manners, the haughtiness she would exhibit toward those who were trying to purchase her good will, but privately Hellman felt otherwise. For decades she suppressed her real feelings that the rich had indeed bought Dorothy whether she was willing to acknowledge it or not.
Hellman felt awkward around Dorothy’s wealthy friends. In Pentimento, she described them as an older generation who continued to move in a pre-Depression world that made her uncomfortable. After a few weeks of heavy-drinking nights and headachy mornings, she began to excuse herself from their compulsive partying. The Campbells saw less of her.
In her memoirs, Hellman wrote that her presence in Paris was connected with an invitation to attend a theatrical festival in Moscow. In 1981, when Martha Gellhorn tried to confirm that such an event had actually taken place, she was unsuccessful. Hellman, who liked to endow her smallest action with significance, never admitted simply to tagging along with Dorothy and Alan.
By mid-September, the weather had turned cold and rainy. One night Dorothy ran into Leland Stowe, a Pulitzer Prize—winning foreign correspondent who had just returned from Madrid. Traveling on a leave of absence from the New York Herald Tribune, Stowe could talk of nothing but the events he had seen in Spain. The Loyalist cause, he said later, was “the greatest, most meaningful cause in my life up to then.” When he asked Dorothy if she didn’t want to do something for the Spanish, she reared up defensively and replied that she didn’t wish to use their food when they had so little. Stowe advised her to fill up a suitcase with tins of French food, recommending that she donate the cans to the Spanish and dine on their wretched dishes herself.
Before this conversation with Stowe, Dorothy had not planned to visit Spain, unlike others she knew who practically regarded it as a sacred pilgrimage. One of Dashiell Hammett’s biographers mentions that his desire to visit the war that summer had been refused by the Party, who thought he could be of more use at home. Dorothy had not sought Party approval for the simple reason that she was not eager to risk having her head blown off. “I couldn’t imagine what it was like,” and when she tried to imagine going to war she felt “scared stiff.” Before she parted from Stowe, his words began to have an effect. She was “licked, and I went, and I did.” Alan hurried out to buy canned goods.
During their ten days in Spain, they spent part of the time in Madrid, where they looked up Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway. “Dottie Parker is here and very nice,” Gellhorn wrote to her mother, “and we had a marvelous dinner at [Herbert] Matthews.” The city had been under siege for nearly a year. Despite the evacuation, a million people still lived there, the trams and restaurants crowded, the shops doing business. Dorothy learned that there was little action on the front, but the city did not seem quiet to her. All day long she could hear the dull boom of the big guns and the irritable crackle of the smaller machine guns. She had to keep reminding herself that “gunners no longer need to shoot for practice.” Surprised to see that people were going about their business without hysteria, she calmed down and even went shopping like a tourist, purchasing a sheaf of war posters as souvenirs. A government employee acted as escort and interpreter because she was anxious to speak to people she met on the streets. When she asked a woman living with seven children in a bombed-out house why she had not left, she received a reasonable reply: She was waiting for her husband to come home from the front on furlough.
After a few days, Dorothy and Alan journeyed to Valencia, the capital of Republican Spain. Shortly after their arrival, the city suffered its worst air raid of the war. On a bright Sunday morning, five German planes unloaded sixty bombs on the area around the port. Afterward, Dorothy went to view the damage for herself. She never forgot the hills of rubble on which she noticed a broken doll and a dead kitten, the two small girls trying to push past guards to the house where their mother probably lay buried. That evening she and Alan visited one of the big popular cafés, where she stared mesmerized at a baby wearing a blue ribbon in her hair and where the waiter outdid himself to find a few pieces of grayish ice for the vermouths they ordered.
During their stay, Valencia was raided four times. She preferred night raids because she could anesthetize her fear to some extent by pretending it was a ballet with “scurrying figures and the great white drafts of the searchlights.” In the daytime she could not avoid seeing the terror on people’s faces. Most wrenching to watch were the children. She saw them on the streets with their mothers, visited the homeless in children’s refugee camps, observed them in schools drawing pictures of sailboats, and stared at the faces of those who were starving. “They don’t cry. Only you see their eyes. While you’re there and after you’re back, you see their eyes.”
On October 11, she and Alan flew to Paris, which seemed like another planet—shops shocked the eye with creamy yellow butter and Brie, and charcuteries offered beefsteaks adorned with sprigs of parsley. Practically the first person they ran into was Lillian Hellman. After giving her an excited account of their trip, it was natural for them to encourage her to go. They offered advice about what to take and who to see. So persuasive were they that Hellman departed for Spain only a few days later. Describing her travels in An Unfinished Woman, Hellman devoted some thirty pages to her role in the Spanish war, including the time her foray into the street during an air raid elicited a compliment from Hemingway: “So you have cojones after all.”
Despite her cojones, Hellman failed to mention that Dorothy and Alan had preceded her to Spain. Instead, she emphasized Dorothy’s rich friends. In Hellman’s version, Alan never got to play any role except a cojones-less swish. Martha Gellhorn, comparing Hellman’s visit to Dorothy’s, remembered that she and her friends pooled their canned goods to cook a decent dinner for Hellman, only to find that she arrived empty-handed. “Miss H. brought nothing but herself and unlike Dottie she was not funny,” she wrote and called the reunion “a dull, grumpy dinner.”
After her experiences in Spain, living on the farm made her feel restless. She wrote an article about the war for New Masses and began the first of several short stories. She gave newspaper interviews saying that she wished to do something for the American hospitals in Spain and declared that the Loyalist government “has to win,” even though she secretly believed its cause was hopeless. “You knew darn well it was going to happen, even when you were there.” At parties, she tried to contain her anger against people who asked, “Why did you want to go all the way over and get into that messy thing for? A person like you!”
In Pipersville, the enemy was “Mrs. Camp Bell,” as she had begun calling her mother-in-law. Horte had no desire to hear about Spain and pointedly ignored that part of their trip. Dorothy was apoplectic. She imagined Horte lounging under a magnolia tree and waving a fan while Alan was being “bombed and shelled and machine-gunned and sniped at,” and decided that her mother-in-law didn’t give a damn about her son.
“Well,” Horte said to Dorothy, “that old war wasn’t goin’ on while you were there, was it?”
“Oh, no, they stopped the war while your son was there.”
“Well, I tho’t so,” Horte replied.
A few days after her return, Dorothy received a letter from the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, a group that the House Un-American Activities Committee later said was a Communist front organization. Sheelagh Kennedy knew about Dorothy’s trip and thought she might be interested in the women’s subcommittee they were organizing to undertake a campaign on behalf of Spanish children. The nonpolitical group would be a purely humanitarian effort to help refugee children facing another winter of starvation. She wondered if Dorothy might want to offer aid or advice. Dorothy, still shaken by memories of the children, replied promptly.
Dear Miss Kennedy,
I want with all my heart to do anything I can in the campaign to aid Spanish children.
I am living here in the country, but it is a very little way from New York, and I could come in any time you might want me.
Sincerely yours,
Dorothy Parker
The voluminous files of this group, preserved in the Rare Book and Manuscript collection at Columbia University, are full of solicitation letters to women of means, who were likely prospects for cash donations, tickets to cocktail parties, or a loan of their homes for fund-raising parties. While many letters were mailed out, acceptances were predictably few. Sheelagh Kennedy must have been overjoyed to hear from Dorothy. She promptly telegraphed Fox House to thank Dorothy for the letter and to invite her to a meeting the very next day. Within two weeks, Dorothy had become national chairman.
In her honor, Sheelagh Kennedy arranged a luncheon that drew an enthusiastic crowd of notables, including the Spanish ambassador. Dorothy, in her address to the guests, discovered that public speaking terrified her. She managed to get a laugh by saying that she had been “scared green” in Spain, but she said she believed herself to be the only person in the country to feel frightened. She went on to praise the courage of the Spanish people. In months to come, Kennedy scheduled speaking dates for her, even though she continued to suffer intense nervousness. She believed her speeches were banal and repetitious.
But the people at the women’s division thought she was wonderful, that how she sounded made little difference when her talks raised so much money for Spain.
From the first, it was clear that volunteer work was going to make heavy demands on her time, a good deal more than she had bargained for. Her holidays were taken up by fund-raising parties. She and Alan spent New Year’s Eve in the Village at a charity ball for Spain because Dorothy had promised to be there. Two weeks later, they were back in the Hollywood rat race, this time working at MGM. Dorothy promptly christened their new employer Metro-Goldwyn-Merde.
When Sid and Laura Perelman gave up a job at MGM because Laura was pregnant, the Campbells were hired as their replacement. The picture was a Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald musical, an adaptation of Victor Herbert’s operetta Sweethearts. MGM offered Dorothy and Alan two thousand dollars a week, which was double the Perelmans’ joint salary, but a comedown from their last ill-fated job working for Sam Goldwyn. Even though their agent, Zeppo Marx, had managed to sweeten the deal by persuading MGM to pay the cost of their transportation from the East Coast, Dorothy did not feel the least bit appreciative.
With relish, the Perelmans proceeded to brief them on producer Hunt Stromberg’s special eccentricities and the difficulties they might expect to encounter in his unit. Stromberg insisted that everyone attend a story conference so that he personally could bring his new writing team up to date.
On Monday, January 17, 1938, Dorothy, Alan, and Sid, who remained on the payroll, presented themselves at Stromberg’s office. Perelman was curious to see at close range how his friends would function in “an industrial setting,” far from Bucks County’s parlors. Dorothy sank into the shadows of a deep armchair, put on her glasses, and brought forth her knitting from a reticule. Alan revealed himself to be “the drive train of the duo, toothy, voluble, bubbling with suggestions, charming the birds out of the trees,” while Dorothy subtracted herself from the meeting, turning down her attention to a level where she appeared to be in need of oxygen. Hunt Stromberg, zigzagging back and forth with his shoelaces untied and dragging, rambled on. He puffed on one or another of his collection of pipes and had a disquieting habit of flinging around wooden matches, some of them still lit, with little regard for ash trays. Perelman pondered the article that Dorothy was knitting. Since it was gray and measured about seven feet in length, he decided it must be a carpet, most likely a staircase runner. Every now and then Stromberg interrupted his discourse to stop at Dorothy’s chair.
“I’d say we were making pretty good progress, eh, Dorothy?”
Dorothy’s spectacles kept sliding down her nose. Looking up uncertainly, she made an attempt to return from outer space. “Oh, I do think it’s altogether marvelous, don’t you?” This slid from her lips in a breathless rush, after which she submerged into a coma once more.
Perelman recalled how Stromberg, still in full flow, finally managed to set a fire under Dorothy. It happened on the third day of the conference when Perelman, surreally bored, was not fully awake. He became conscious of Stromberg’s trailing shoelaces and his pipe, then spied an odd cloud that was beginning to wreathe Dorothy’s head, almost a nimbus halo. It dawned on Perelman that it must be smoke when he heard Alan’s voice.
“Dottie!” Alan screamed. “You’re on fire.”
But Perelman could see that
it was just kapok, the stuffing in her chair that was touched off by one of Stromberg’s matches, and it smoked and smoldered a bit after we yanked her out and rolled her on the floor. People ran in, throwing Lily Cups of water on the cushions, but the damage was piffling. The damage to the chair, that is—the damage wrought by Sweethearts is still being dealt with by therapists, I presume.
Sweethearts worked out remarkably well for the Campbell bank account, because they became mired in a script that failed to suit Stromberg and the job dragged on until July. In a letter to Harold Guinzburg’s secretary, Alan complained about their difficulties. After many weeks of work, he said, “We have no story.” He consoled himself by purchasing “a wonderful sofa ... at bargain prices” from friends who were leaving town. Sheelagh Kennedy enriched the U.S. Post Office and Western Union with requests that Dorothy sponsor tea dances, cocktail parties, musicales, and champagne dinner dances, all of them taking place in New York. There was a serious milk shortage, and the Women’s Division felt sure it could collect a thousand dollars if Dorothy appeared. Usually Dorothy sent regrets, but she did fly in for a weekend in March. She stayed at the Waldorf Towers and spoke at a meeting to raise money for powdered milk and ambulances. As always, she disliked her performance and afterward apologized to Kennedy for “my bad speech and hurried exit.” In May, during a Newspaper Guild strike in Los Angeles, she marched in a picket line outside the Hollywood Citizen-News.
During the years 1938—1941, their joint salary stabilized at two thousand dollars a week. Among the films they worked on were Crime Takes a Holiday and Flight into Nowhere (both Columbia Pictures), Trade Winds (United Artists), and Weekend for Three(RKO). Several other films were never produced. In 1941, when Sam Goldwyn bought the film rights to Lillian Hellman’s successful Broadway drama Watch on the Rhine, Hellman asked several friends to write additional dialogue, including Dorothy and Alan and her former husband, Arthur Kober. Kober later claimed that their contribution was so insignificant that having their names on the picture was absurd but Alan Campbell was “a little guy who needed the credit,” and therefore all three names were used.
Alan’s reputation as a “little guy” persisted. Many in the industry chose to regard him as an illegitimate writer riding on his famous wife’s coattails. The truth was otherwise. Alan was beginning to get a few assignments on his own. Budd Schulberg believed that he was badly maligned, that Dorothy could not have held a job without him. “Her work habits were terrible, but Alan was extremely disciplined. He dragged her along. At United Artists, I watched how they worked. Alan would say, ‘We start at nine A.M.’—and they would start. After he’d blocked out a scene, he’d tell her, ‘We need a real zinger here,’ and then Dottie would come up with lines to improve his dialogue. In his own right he was a really good screenwriter, maybe because he’d once been an actor, but nobody gave him credit.”
It was fortunate that Alan had plenty of patience, because Dorothy could be a surly collaborator. While they were writing Sweethearts at MGM, the neighboring office was occupied by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. When the door was open, they could hear Dorothy and Alan composing dialogue out loud.
“And then what does he say?” Alan asked.
Dorothy’s answer was soft but audible. “Shit.”
“Please don’t use that word,” Alan muttered. Turning back to his typewriter, he continued, “All right—and then what does she say?”
“Shit.”
“Don’t use that word!”
According to Albert Hackett, Alan did all the typing. “He also did all the work. He pushed Dottie.” Often she would be in a complaining, critical mood. She spoke disdainfully about the money they earned, saying that they spent every penny—their paychecks melted like ice cubes. People in Hollywood got on her nerves too. At a party, she listened politely as British actor Herbert Marshall made repeated references to his busy “shedule.” When she could stand it no longer, she burst out, “I think you’re full of skit.”
Despite her complaints, she never seriously suggested they leave Hollywood.
You could have the most remarkable house. You could have a pool, if you wished. I don’t swim. My goodness, you could have so many things. And you said to yourself while you were there, “For heaven’s sake, I might as well live as good as I can while I have to be here.”
Occasionally she enjoyed a wonderful laugh, as when a producer once asked her, “Now listen—are we extracting the milk of the theme?” Since extraction was tough work, she never belittled the sweat that went into screen writing. To an interviewer who suggested the work was demeaning, she quickly protested, “No, it wasn’t dreadful. It was a terrible bore. It was a strenuous bore. You sat there and you sat there and you sat there. That’s what it was.”
After work, Alan drove them to the house they had purchased in the provinces, way out in Coldwater Canyon. She had been charmed by the place at first sight, because its authentic bar had once been part of an old San Francisco saloon. It was a comfortable small house with a large garden, perched on the side of a hill. She made no objection to the pink satin drapes and cabbage rose wallpaper Alan installed in the living room. They lived there off and on for two years. One day, she looked out the window and told Alan they would have to move immediately because there was “a suicide light” rippling on the hill behind the house.
They hastened back to the Garden of Allah, where the light did not make her think that it might be refreshing to be dead.
A newspaper reporter asked her if she would care to say a few words about her life.
By all means. It was “terrible.”
Didn’t she enjoy anything?
Certainly. “Flowers, French fried potatoes, and a good cry.”
In the spring of 1939, Madrid fell to the Fascists, and President Roosevelt recognized the Franco government. Even though the war in Spain had been lost, the refugee situation remained grim. A half-million Spanish Republicans, having fled to France, were stranded on the French side of the frontier. Money had to be raised in America so that something could be done for them.
Dorothy was able to collect thousands of dollars in a single evening by inviting Hollywood friends to her home and calling it a party. Since she had a tendency to assume personal responsibility for world catastrophe, she gave herself no credit. She insisted that she was not doing enough to help while she complained simultaneously that raising money was “the dirtiest of all jobs.” Public speaking still made her miserably nervous.
As conditions in Europe worsened during 1939, she grew more agitated about Hitler. Nazis obsessed her, and she affected to spy storm troopers behind every tree. Many people in America were unwilling to listen. Her habit of appealing to people’s emotions sometimes struck them as paranoid and hysterical.
In Boston, at a Foreign Policy Association luncheon, Dorothy portrayed the Germans as demons. One of the guests, chalking her remarks up to exaggeration, thought it was a pity a more objective speaker had not been invited. In Washington, a party for the Loyalists at the home of New Deal economist Leon Henderson, Dorothy arrived in an expensive fur coat. Sitting on a baby grand piano, she first talked calmly about the war, but soon could not keep from boiling over into angry tears. The living room was packed wall to wall with dry-eyed, embarrassed guests who stared at her. She began scolding. “If you had seen what I saw in Spain, you’d be serious too. And you’d be up on this piano, trying to help those people.” A humorist in the year 1939 was whistling sad songs, she decided, became nothing was funny in the world anymore. Twenty-five years later, talking about the Spanish defeat remained difficult for her because, she said, “I die hard.”
The Spanish Children’s Milk Fund, as her group was now called, mailed out letters and signed Dorothy’s name. Among those regularly solicited for contributions or labor were writers once associated with the Round Table. Robert Benchley, asked to emcee a benefit, scribbled a curt refusal. The relentless letters annoyed Edna Ferber, whose crusty all-purpose RSVP stated that she did not wish to be a patron, purchase a box seat, attend the Coq Rouge cocktail party, or support a Stars for Spain benefit, but she was enclosing five dollars for two tickets, which she did not intend to use. Bill Benét, invited to a luncheon honoring Dorothy, sent his acceptance in verse:
Though the world grows darker
And life grows starker,
I’m all for a luncheon
For Dorothy Parker.
Meanwhile, Dorothy went on appearing at rallies even though there were times when she had to wire the Milk Fund, “... would you send me brief encouraging wire as to what my speech is to be about.” If the number of extant form letters is any measurement, great quantities of mail went out, all of this correspondence carried on by the industrious Milk Fund staff. Dorothy, who was in Pennsylvania or California, never saw the letters, a situation she would be at a loss to explain when an investigating committee questioned her about it in the 1950s.
The terrible year of 1939 was a year of personal failure for Dorothy and Alan. They collaborated on a play, an adaptation of a comedy by the Hungarian playwright Miklos Laszlo. When they finished, The Happiest Man was practically a new work. The happy man of the title works for a plumbing supply company, has everything in life he wants, then the company suddenly fires him after eighteen years. Dorothy sprinkled the script with polemics, which got watered down in the end and lost some of their bite, but it was an amusing play that looked like it would reach Broadway without problems. Otto Preminger was asked to direct, Paul Muni and Burgess Meredith to play the leads. Then, for no apparent reason, producer Max Gordon dropped his option. In despair, Dorothy and Alan themselves took a six-month option and tried to get it produced. Not until 1942 did she acknowledge defeat and admit that The Happiest Man had gone “completely by-by.”
Again, the dream of theatrical success eluded her. The closest she got to Broadway was journeying to Baltimore for the out-of-town opening of Lillian Hellman’s new play, The Little Foxes. The title, taken from the Song of Solomon, had been Dorothy’s suggestion. As if that was not frustrating enough, the Algonquin Hotel was suing her about a party she had given for Philip Barry after the opening of his new play, Here Come the Clowns. The unpaid bill sent Frank Case to court claiming that her guests had eaten 182 dinners and drank 730 cocktails. The court awarded the Algonquin $488.22, which Dorothy probably had never intended to pay since she always regarded the hotel as one of her patrons. Apparently, Case thought she had become rich. She told a newspaper columnist that, despite her salary, she was forced to sell her house and move to a hotel because she gave away nearly everything she earned. “Dot,” Charles MacArthur remarked to Janet Flanner, “will never be happy until she is on relief.”
In 1939, she became pregnant again. She took no care to curtail her activities and seemed not to care whether she lost the baby. Perhaps by this time she sensed that she would abort no matter the precautions she took, which was precisely what occurred. Afterward, suffering from a lingering, low-grade depression, she insisted she must have diabetes mellitus, until her doctor managed to convince her it simply was not true.
The miscarriage marked an important turning point in Dorothy’s relations with Alan. Their marriage was never the same again, once the structural defects in its foundation slowly began to expose themselves. Entirely apart from the fact that Alan loved her deeply, he had seemed to be an ideal partner in many ways, both prescription and placebo for her ailments when she was forty. He made plausible the middle-aged woman’s idyll of rejuvenation by a young lover, the alcoholic’s prayer for alliance with a devoted fixer, the orphan’s longing for a protective mother. On a fantasy level, Alan was practically perfect, except for the fact that he was not rich. Secretly, Dorothy had always resented his lack of a private fortune. On one occasion, after she had roundly abused him before a gathering of friends, someone reminded her that he was a charming, handsome man who adored her. What more did she want from the poor guy? “Presents,” she growled. One of her most popular verses, written in 1923, expressed a belief from her childhood, that love was better when it was attached to money:
Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.
She had received many perfect roses from Alan but he was never able to present her with a limousine that her own labor had not helped to finance. She knew that his income since their marriage had depended entirely on being her husband. She also suspected that without her, his career as a screenwriter would dry up and blow away. Even though she needed him badly, he needed her even more desperately, but this subject they were unable to broach, let alone discuss. Still, for the first five years of their marriage, this trade-off and their endless mutual dependencies had been obscured by Dorothy’s fruitless quest for a baby.
Marrying a thirty-year-old husband had allowed her to roll back the clock and pretend that she was his contemporary, thereby enabling her to plan for a baby as might any thirty-year-old bride. Like most Faustian bargains, this one held for a while.
She had sex faithfully, whether Alan felt like it or not, and she spent the better part of five years hanging around gynecologists’ waiting rooms. Submitting herself to every infertility treatment known to medical research had resulted in at least two pregnancies (if there were more there is no record), followed by two spontaneous abortions, which had caused her a surprising amount of physical discomfort, but she had persevered without complaint.
While most people thought Alan would make a splendid father, and he himself expressed eagerness for children, Dorothy was not fully convinced. As each of her pregnancies advanced, as she began to gain weight and take on pouter-pigeon proportions, she detected subtle shifts in his feelings toward her, changes that provoked her own ambivalences about having a child. As early as a few weeks into a pregnancy, she felt roly-poly and unattractive, which accentuated the age difference between herself and Alan. The process of reproduction, by which she hoped to recall her youth, also made her look and feel her actual age and exacerbated her fears about losing Alan to a younger woman.
Another aspect of their marriage that pregnancy threatened to disturb was their child-mother relationship. A genuine child in the family would have presented Dorothy with a sibling rival. Beneath Alan’s superficial enthusiasm for the idea of fathering, she detected a whispered message that he was not as interested in caring for two children as everyone assumed.
They claimed to be eager for a child, yet they never considered the obvious alternative of adoption.
After the miscarriage, her weight pushing one hundred and fifty pounds, she neglected her grooming and moaned that she wanted to shut herself in a room and push the bureau across the door. When Alan suggested they take a vacation, she scorned the idea as stupid. She could not prance off on a grand tour with all the misery and suffering in the world. Once she had whined herself out, she agreed that it might not be a bad idea after all. The whole world lay before them: “We can go any place our fancy takes us,” Alan wrote the Goetzes, and he named the possibilities: Rome, Petrograd, Budapest, Paris, Blue Ball [Pennsylvania]. They chose Paris. Dorothy perked up and wrote to her sister, “Things have been pretty bad as I think you guess and this may be a life saver.”
On June 17, they sailed on the Veendam, a Dutch ship that developed turbine trouble and took ten days to cross the Atlantic, during which time the bars were drunk dry. Dorothy, still portly, was irritated to learn that a number of passengers had mistaken her for Gertrude Stein. When the Paris boat train lost a car and they had to sit for hours in the countryside, Dorothy and Alan got acquainted with a group of students from Amherst and Princeton who were thrilled to meet a famous author. Dorothy’s appearance disappointed them, however. John Davies thought that she was “the sloppiest woman I ever met: cracked nail polish, stringy unflattering bangs, runny makeup, broad derriere, a shapeless unfashionable pleated dress with green and white flowers.” Helen Walker also noticed that “she wore more makeup than was becoming. She painted her cheeks with great round circles of rouge.”
Dorothy and Alan took up residence in an elaborate apartment in Avenue Saint-Honore-d’Eylau borrowed from actress Maxine Elliott. It was decorated in the worst possible taste and to reach the apartment it was necessary to ride an ancient elevator that habitually got stuck between the second and third floors. Alan adored the place. That summer, Janet Flanner reported in The New Yorker that Paris was suddenly experiencing “a fit of prosperity, gaiety, and hospitality.” She described magnificent costume balls and garden parties, the air filled with music and the smell of money and the expensive hotels congested with American and English tourists. Still, the city seemed schizoid. Even though the chief topic of conversation was war—and everybody thought it was coming soon—nobody believed it would arrive that summer to spoil their holidays. At the same time, war was difficult to forget because the Germans sent planes over every night, and the drone of their circling made sleep difficult.
Dorothy enjoyed buying new hats and sipping cocktails at the Crillon Bar with Sara Murphy, Muriel King, Janet Flanner, and Louise Macy. Again, she and Alan got together with the students they met on the train, especially with Helen and Bob Walker. On the Fourth of July, the Walkers joined them at a reception at the American Embassy. When Dorothy was immediately surrounded by clusters of fans, twenty-one-year-old Helen Walker was intrigued to notice that Alan disappeared into a corner and left his wife to enjoy the limelight alone. Alan impressed Helen as “a darling, just the sweetest, most considerate man.”
For all his sweetness, it was clear that something was amiss. Helen Walker had heard about Dorothy’s miscarriage and knew she continued to feel depressed, so she made allowances for her irritability. Walker observed, “Dottie was never happy staying anywhere for very long and always wanted to keep moving.” Alan was adept at managing her moods and made excuses when she became obnoxious. “One of the things that bothered me,” said Walker, “was how hilariously funny she would be one minute and so bitter and angry the next—about the Spanish war, about people like Hemingway whom she considered hypocrites. Whenever she got caustic, Alan would tell us, ‘Well, it’s good for her to let out her anger.’ ”
It was a trying time. A few weeks later, after they had returned to Pipersville, Dorothy was dismayed to hear that the Soviet Union and Germany had banded together in their nonaggression pact. The events during the following weeks—Hitler’s march into Poland, the English and French declaration of war, and Russia’s subsequent invasion of Poland—caused further grief. When the American Communist Party opposed the war and called the Soviet invasion justified, some of Dorothy’s friends dropped out of the C.P. The pact also caused wholesale resignations from the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which weathered this setback by changing its name to the Hollywood League for Democratic Action. Dorothy did not pull out.
Out of loyalty to her friends, she did not publicly criticize either the pact or Stalin or the American Communist Party, nor did she abandon any of the groups to which she had lent her name. However great her private doubts, she hewed to the party line against the war until 1941 when Hitler broke the pact by invading Russia. Then, however, she made up for those two years of silence by supporting the war wholeheartedly.
Meanwhile, it was not pleasant to be a Communist or a fellow traveler in Hollywood, where she received severe censure from her liberal friends. Alan admitted to Aleck Woollcott that “a great many people have stopped speaking to us.”
In the fall of 1940, Dorothy and Alan were invited to Sun Valley by Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway. On their return to Hollywood, Dorothy had a pelvic examination, which revealed the presence of uterine fibroid tumors, benign growths of fibrous connective tissues that occur commonly and usually go undetected because they produce no symptoms. Fibroids generally require no treatment, unless they begin to enlarge as did Dorothy’s. She now learned that probably the fibroids were irritated by her pregnancies, and also may have affected her ability both to conceive and to carry a fetus to term.
Knowledge of the fibroids plummeted her into self-loathing, and she immediately imagined herself trying to pass for normal but “all the while containing a rock-garden planted with every flower mentioned in Shakespeare.” The references to Elizabethan flowers could not conceal her sense of feeling gangrenous.
Standard treatment for fibroid tumors is removal of the uterus. Dorothy entered the hospital for a hysterectomy.
Alan expected major trouble to follow the operation. He telegraphed the farm and ordered her favorite dog, a Sealyham terrier, shipped out by rail as a cheery surprise. He was astonished to notice that Dorothy already seemed “quite cheerful” and looked happier and more radiant than she had appeared in a long time. Convalescing in a Beverly Hills house he had rented at 602 North Bedford, cared for by a team of Canadian nurses, she stressed her guilty contentment in a letter to Aleck Woollcott: “I am full of a peaceful, negative joy that that damned operation is over.” Probably she also felt better knowing that the quest for pregnancy had ended, a relief that Alan seemed to share.
By the middle of December, Dorothy had recuperated. On Friday the thirteenth, she and Alan attended a dinner party at the home of Nathanael West and his wife, Eileen, who had been married eight months and had recently moved into a house in North Hollywood. It was a convivial evening among old friends, including Scott Fitzgerald, Elliot Paul, Frances Goodrich, and Albert Hackett. As their mood grew increasingly nostalgic, they began talking about the twenties and sang “The Last Time I Saw Paris.”
The following Saturday afternoon, Scott fell dead of a heart attack while browsing through the Princeton Alumni Weekly and eating a Hershey bar. The next day the Wests were killed in a car crash, returning home in their Ford station wagon after a weekend hunting trip below the Mexican border. Fitzgerald was forty-four, West thirty-seven. Even though Scott had suffered a minor heart attack in November and “Pep” West was notorious as one of the most maniacal drivers ever to hit the Los Angeles freeway, Alan convinced himself that he had but a short while to live. Extremely superstitious at times, certain that Friday-the-thirteenth bad luck occurred in threes, he was petrified. Robert Benchley described him as “hiding under the bed.”
Dorothy thought his behavior was silly. Her chief problem with death had always been the depressing thought that she had lacked competency to successfully do away with herself. Her imaginary hope was that on the “other side,” she would be able to eavesdrop on the living and finally learn what they had been saying behind her back.
Both of her friends were laid out at Pierce Brothers Mortuaries. Visiting the funeral home, she walked down a long, carpeted corridor to reach Scott’s casket, which had been placed on view in the William Wordsworth Room. She and Alan were among the few people in Hollywood who came to pay their respects. The embalmer had worked on Scott’s features to make him look youthful. Not a line showed on his face or a gray hair on his head. His hands, however, were as thin and wizened as an old man’s. His flesh had craved alcohol, but, despite his reform, he had still died young. Dorothy, sober, stood beside the coffin staring a long time. Although she had been sharply critical of Scott, even telling several friends that she thought he had turned into a horse’s ass, she was struck by the isolation of the room, the absence of mourners or flowers, and Hollywood’s complete disinterest in his death. To mind came Jay Gatsby’s funeral and the words spoken by the bespectacled character that Scott had named “Owl-eyes.”
“The poor son-of-a-bitch,” she said softly.
Later, when her remark made its way around the film industry, few recognized it as a quote from Fitzgerald’s novel. It was assumed that she had delivered some pithy eulogy over his coffin.
During 1939 and 1940 she began to make Alan the scapegoat for the death of her motherhood dream, and he felt obliged to accept the blame. Up to this point in their marriage she had wanted to be a good wife. Granted, she was not a conventional one, but she had behaved no differently than any male writer of comparable reputation. She had married in the expectation that Alan would appreciate her intellectual gifts and take for granted that her comfort came first. She also wanted him to be her partner, collaborator, and equal. Marriage to her had given him entrée to some of the most respected literary and theatrical figures of the time, helped him to achieve self-assurance as a writer, and enabled him to live on a scale that he probably would never have achieved on his own. She had made possible his becoming “the damnedest snob in the world,” as a friend pointed out, a person who indexed people on A, B, and C social lists, who could not host a party without engaging a butler but then made a show of forgetting the man’s name.
In addition to the tangible benefits she felt she had conferred upon him, she also had been loyal, his most dedicated defender and supporter. From the start of their marriage, some of her friends had ridiculed Alan. Benchley told the Murphys that an evening with Dorothy and Alan reminded him of adolescent visits to Rosemary Hall (a girls’ prep school), and he always expected to find himself making fudge in Alan’s room before the evening was over. While Dorothy could not avoid noticing people’s smirks, she never uttered a disrespectful word against Alan. That began to change as she turned on him the full force of her abuse, both to his face and behind his back. She knew his vulnerable spots better than anyone and quickly hit pay dirt.
Suddenly there were belittling references to Alan’s stage career. She would ask friends if they had ever seen Alan act. Never, she declared, had he appeared on a Broadway stage without a tennis racquet or a lime squash in his hands. Seeing him perform, she said, was like watching a Vassar girl whose coiffure seemed on the verge of collapse at any moment. In this way, she announced that criticisms of Alan could thenceforth be expressed openly, that she would in fact welcome them. When a friend admitted that Alan made her nervous, Dorothy promptly replied that she would be psychotic if he didn’t.
Dorothy had a number of homosexual friends. Although presumed to be tolerant, she was secretly prejudiced and enjoyed making caustic remarks at their expense. Around lesbians, her ragging tended to be easygoing. During a dinner in Paris with Janet Flanner and her friends, the subject of legal marriage had come up. When asked for her opinion, Dorothy nodded sympathetically. Lesbians should have the legal right to marry, she said, because the children had to be considered. Far less tolerant of males, she took gleeful pleasure in being mean: “Scratch an actor and find an actress.” Now, searching for the worst insult for Alan, she began to insinuate that he was a homosexual.
At a dinner party in Bucks County, she held out her hands in a dramatic gesture of defeat and announced loudly, “What am I doing with him? He’s as queer as a goat.” Albert Hackett heard her say, “What am I doing in Hollywood at my age and married to a fairy?” She hadn’t been at one of Charles Brackett’s Sunday brunches ten minutes before she noticed Alan in conversation with a group of young men at the bar and muttered: “It’s the curved lips of those boys that’s got him so interested.” Growing reckless, she devastated her mother-in-law by inquiring, “Where’s my homo husband?” When Dorothy was not referring to Alan as “that pansy,” she was only slightly less vituperative and called him “that shit” or “that man.” Said Ruth Goetz, “In the beginning she was sweet and tender with Alan, but as life wore on, she found his mannerisms immensely irritating. He embarrassed her. And the more embarrassed and the angrier she got, the more she drank.”
Very likely her accusations were unjustified. Although Alan had mannerisms that might have been considered feminine, never at any time was he known to have a sexual relationship with a man. Nevertheless, some of their friends now began to take Dorothy’s word for Alan’s homosexuality or bisexuality, whether they saw evidence of it or not. They assumed that somewhere in his past, if not his present, there must have been male lovers.
Dorothy did not really believe that Alan was sneaking off to sleep with men. Presumably, what she meant to convey was that he no longer wished to sleep with her.
Alan remained stoic. Whenever guests came over, setting the stage for an evening of drinking and providing an audience for Dorothy’s attacks, he faithfully concocted his secret-recipe canapés and served shakers of tequila cocktails. Dorothy’s acrimonious stories about him brought a smile to his lips.
They constantly saw Sid and Laura Perelman, who took great pleasure in gossiping about the Campbells. Sid, well known for his hostility toward homosexuals, referred to Alan as “that fag,” although it is striking how much time he spent with the Campbells. He insisted this was Laura’s fault, for it was she who felt life in Hollywood would be unbearable without Dorothy and Alan. Perelman functioned as a West Coast news agency speeding the latest dispatches back to the Goetzes in Keller’s Church:
Dotty has been heard to say very freely that this is the end, etc., etc. I am sure you were with us, in spirit at least, one evening not long ago when we spent an evening with them and Janet Flanner and a group of spectacular bull-dikers of the Elsa Maxwell set. The talk was strictly concerned with H.R.H. the Nizam of Hyderabad who dresses up as a faun in a tiger-skin and chases his cicisbeos around the conservatory with bull-whips. Alan was in a sheer tizzy, and although the figures have not yet come in from the outlying districts, on dit he came three times.
Dorothy and Alan must have enjoyed extending the privilege of house seats at their arguments to the Perelmans as much as Laura and Sid liked serving as their audience. Certain caustic scenes tended to be routine curtain-raisers: Alan’s nagging about money, Dorothy’s insistence they could live on the farm for ten thousand dollars a year if he fired his secretary. Alan could not believe she wanted to live at Fox House year-round; it had no heated swimming pool.
Like many who live with alcoholics, Alan had a large capacity for accepting abuse. As a child, he had perfected the skill of smiling his gorgeous white smile—there is not a single unsmiling photograph—and he reacted to Dorothy’s assaults with performances of Oscar-winning quality. Adopting a common steam valve, he complained incessantly about how badly Dorothy treated him, but he did not consider leaving her. Some wondered why. Ruth Goetz called him “that poor bastard. Believe me, his life was not an easy one. She simply crucified him.” Sid Perelman, speculating about when Alan would “beat the living urine” out of his wife, waited for him to snap.
Dorothy’s politics had no effect whatsoever on her screen writing because, contrary to the later claims of the House Un-American Activities Committee, it was virtually impossible for any individual writer to inject messages, subversive or otherwise, into a Hollywood picture. Even if she had contemplated such an idea, Alan would never have allowed any step that might threaten their livelihood. Hollywood wealth had become necessary to support their scale of living.
Communism did have a prominent influence on her creative work, what little there was of it at this period. By now, with great relief, she had given up writing verse. She had chafed under the charge that she was a second-rate Edna St. Vincent Millay, an accusation that she was all too ready to accept as true. She bitterly described herself later as a person who had slogged along in Millay’s footsteps “unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.” She was the first to call attention to her failure as a serious poet, insisting that her verse was bad because it had been fashionable.
In the late thirties, she continued to write fiction, and it was into this work that the Communist Party philosophy marched in heavy boots. Editors like Harold Ross were appalled.
After the publication of “Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street” in 1934, three years passed before she completed another story for The New Yorker. Although she had never been a prolific contributor, three years between submissions was an unusually long interval. When she finally did offer a story, it was heavily laced with the Party line and not particularly successful. Unlike Budd Schulberg, whose novel What Makes Sammy Run? was attacked by the Party for being insufficiently proletarian, a criticism that led to his dropping out of the C.P., Dorothy had no conflicts over artistic integrity. Without prompting, she was inspired to produce dutifully proletarian stories. “Clothe the Naked” is a dull, heavy-handed manifesto: Big Lannie, an impoverished black laundress who does washing for “secure and leisured” white matrons, is raising her blind grandson, Raymond. When Big Lannie dresses the boy in cast-off clothing she has begged from an employer, an elegant suit and pair of shoes that had belonged to Mrs. Ewing’s husband, he goes outside for a promenade in the grand clothing and is almost beaten to death by white workmen.
Dorothy’s best work was inspired by her own experiences: the urban, after-dark landscape she shared with Hazel Morse in “Big Blonde”—smoke-filled speakeasies, moneyed men, Scotch, and the inevitable nightcap of Veronal. Both Dorothy and Hazel employed black maids who could be counted on to rescue them when they had overdosed on sleeping powders. Dorothy, being neither black nor southern, a laundress nor a grandmother, knew practically nothing about Big Lannie, except what she could imagine, which was not a great deal.
The New Yorker rejected “Clothe the Naked.” It was the first submission of Dorothy’s that Harold Ross had turned down since the magazine’s beginning, and he apparently had difficulty informing her of his decision. She was, after all, among the four or five writers who had, as Brendan Gill has noted, “helped to invent what the world came to call the ‘New Yorker’ short story....” Unsure how to proceed, Ross talked the problem over with Harold Guinzburg, who advised waiting before either of them notified Dorothy. The blow would be softened if Guinzburg could tell her it had been sold to another magazine. When he submitted the story to Harper’s, the story was turned down again.
Meanwhile, a month had passed and Dorothy was getting worried. She fumed at Ross’s silence. It took the magazine three weeks to reject stories by mediocrities, she complained, and they might at least extend her the same courtesy. Her mood was not improved by the publication of a nasty profile in Cue magazine, which might have been libelous had it not been so accurate. Clearly, her so-called friends in New York had been blabbing because there were references to Ed Parker’s suicide attempts, John Gilbert’s sexual rejection of her (she was quoted as having said Gilbert was “a dear but he never wants to go to bed”), and it also recalled various humiliations at the hands of John McClain. Someone she knew had betrayed her.
Alan wrote secretly to Guinzburg and asked him to get in touch with Dorothy at once. By now, Guinzburg had been able to place “Clothe the Naked” with Scribner’s and was able to present Dorothy with pleasant news. From the beginning of their association, he had adopted a protective attitude. Over the years, he had grown adept at handling her ego like a delicate icon. Neglecting to mention the Harper’s rejection, he told her the story didn’t really belong in The New Yorker and insisted it was good business for her work to appear in a first-class literary magazine like Scribner’s, “in order to get away from the widely-held notion that you write only for the New Yorker, live at the Algonquin, and associate only with Woollcott and Ferber.” He apologized for Scribner’s“measly” two hundred and fifty dollars.
To Alan, Guinzburg wrote privately that “there is something wrong with the story, and I think I know what it is.” Although the weakness was obvious—indigestible propaganda cooked too little to become art—Guinzburg could not bring himself to name the flaw and lamely told Alan that the story’s ending was not strong enough to justify the buildup of anticipation throughout the piece. This is a curious conclusion since part of the story’s failure is that its violent conclusion seems too strong for everything that has preceded it.
After rejecting “Clothe the Naked,” Harold Ross grew increasingly suspicious of Dorothy as a writer. In some ways he had never trusted her and once referred to her, with an affectionate smile, as an alley cat. When James Thurber had been an editor at The New Yorker, Ross cautioned him to keep an eye on Dorothy because she inserted double meanings into her copy to embarrass him. He warned Thurber to query everything. Now he was on the lookout in case she was plotting to slip Red propaganda into his magazine. Their twenty-year friendship seemed in danger of deteriorating completely. Writing in New Masses in 1939, Dorothy described an editor who had turned down a story about the Spanish war because it favored the Republicans. “God damn it,” he had said to her, “why can’t you be funny again?” This nameless editor was Ross.
In 1927, Ross had made no objection to printing “Arrangement in Black and White,” a story that dealt with racial prejudice, but the reason he had done so was not to his credit. He “thought it was a scream,” Dorothy recalled. That, she assured herself, made no difference so long as it got published. Ten years later, “I tried to use just the same technique with pieces about Loyalist Spain that I wanted to have published. It didn’t work; that’s all. Fun is fun, and all that, but ‘Loyalist’ has become a four-letter word to editors.” After returning from Spain, she submitted several stories to The New Yorker, only to see them rejected. If Ross could not take Dorothy seriously as a foe of international Fascism, she refused to acknowledge his policy that the magazine should not take political stands.
Her pique at Ross ended when she sent him a spare report about some Loyalist soldiers on leave whom she and Alan had met in a Valencia café one Sunday evening. Dorothy had been drinking vermouth, the six soldiers ordered coffee, and she passed around a package of American cigarettes. Talking through an interpreter, the men told her they were farmers and the sons of farmers. “Their village,” she wrote, “was next to that one where the old men and the sick men and the women and children had gone, on a holiday, to the bullring; and the planes had come over and dropped bombs on the bullring, and the old men and the sick men and the women and the children were more than two hundred.” After the soldiers left the café, Dorothy was touched to learn that they had paid for her and Alan’s drinks. Although meeting the soldiers happened much as she described, she preferred to label “Soldiers of the Republic” as fiction. It was the best work she had done in years, an understated, powerful story that captures with tremendous clarity the life inside a crowded café where babies are still awake in the late evening and the death outside where bombs have fallen that morning in broad daylight. It transcends politics, which presumably was the reason Ross accepted it.
In its way, “Soldiers of the Republic” was as propagandist as “Clothe the Naked,” but it was superior artistically. The story was so widely praised after publication that Aleck Woollcott arranged for it to be reprinted as a pamphlet.
The Viking Press was eager to publish a third volume of her collected fiction, but there was little to collect. Since After Such Pleasures, she had written only three stories. When Harold Guinzburg suggested padding with stories rejected from previous collections and with book reviews, Dorothy balked. She disliked nearly all her old work and stubbornly insisted that she wished to reprint nothing except “Soldiers of the Republic” and “Clothe the Naked.”
In an apologetic telegram, she ruled out the possibility of another book and asked his forgiveness. She said her stay in Hollywood had lasted too long, confessed that she felt FRIGHTENED BY THE PASSING OF TIME, and begged for news of her New York friends because IT IS GOOD TO HEAR OF REAL PEOPLE DOING FINE THINGS.
Guinzburg was sympathetic. If an author wished to use her talent doing missionary work, that was her business and he did not condemn her. Her political commitment was no doubt healthy, he replied, but it was irrelevant to commercial book publishing. He scolded her for remaining in Hollywood and succumbing to “the seductions of agents, producers, and others.” As an incentive, he predicted that a new collection of stories would probably earn at least ten thousand dollars in royalties, perhaps forgetting that she and Alan earned almost that much in a month.
Guinzburg, used to getting his own way, was relentless in his coaxing. In the following months he outmaneuvered her. Here Lies was finally published in April 1939. Dedicated to Lillian Hellman, it included “Soldiers of the Republic” and “Clothe the Naked,” as well as a new story she wrote especially for the collection. “The Custard Heart” attacked her wealthy bourgeois women friends who had failed to develop a political consciousness. The remaining twenty-one stories had appeared in earlier books. Although readers found little that was fresh, the book was praised by the critics and sold well. What Dorothy herself admired most about Here Lies was its title. She had wanted to use it for Not So Deep as a Well, but the book of verse had already been printed and Guinzburg had no intention of discarding an entire printing. He had sent her a gentle telegram: WE WOULD HAVE TWENTY THOUSAND BOOKS TO GIVE TO SALVATION ARMY AND THINK OF EFFECT OF THAT.
One of the many chores that Alan gladly took care of was answering Dorothy’s mail, even her correspondence with intimate friends. He signed the personal letters rather sweetly as “alandotty.” Once the marriage began to be troubled, she felt uncomfortable as half an “alandotty.” The more she relied on Alan, the more bitterly she resented him and the stronger became her denials that she needed him. She knew that some people believed her pathetic in this respect and could not help noticing their condescending smiles, even though she asked for their smiles by launching violent tirades against her husband.
Bridling at the funny way Lillian Hellman looked at her, she told her off, although she did it gently. She once looked up from a book she was reading and said to Hellman, “The man said he didn’t want to see her again. That night she tried to climb into the transom of his hotel room and got stuck at the hips. I’ve never got stuck at the hips, Lily, and I want you to remember that.” Precisely the opposite was true.
Suddenly, both she and Alan were eager to prove they could manage without the other. She was writing again. Within a matter of months, she completed “Song of the Shirt, 1941” and “The Standard of Living,” two fine stories that also pleased Harold Ross. In the summer of 1941, she traveled to New York without Alan, a trip that Robert Benchley described as “a friendly divergence.” She kept bellyaching about Hollywood and all her friends back in New York, he wrote,
until Alan suggested she go East and shut up for a while. So she did, and now calls up every day to fight over the phone and hint about coming back, having probably fought with all her Eastern pals. Alan told her he thought she had better stay there a little longer, as he had several jobs of his own to finish before he could team up with her again.
All of a sudden Alan began to assert himself. His confidence shot up when he got a string of assignments from RKO. Most of the scripts on which he worked without Dorothy were not produced, but he was hardly to blame for it. The important achievement was his salary—$1,250 a week.
Dorothy remained away nearly two months. She spent much of the time with Sara and Gerald Murphy at East Hampton, Long Island, and hardly any at Fox House, which she seemed reluctant to visit alone. The farm was isolated and she was used to Alan’s being there, tidying and fussing. While it gave her great pleasure to talk about old times with her friends and to feel she was in the middle of things again, she missed her husband and returned to Beverly Hills in July. On her birthday, she thought nostalgically of Harold Ross and mailed him an affectionate note: “Ah, look, dear Harold—today’s my birthday—Dorothy.”
Not too long afterward, Alfred Hitchcock engaged her to add choice material to a script already written by Peter Viertel and Joan Harrison. Saboteur is about an aircraft factory worker who is wrongfully accused of sabotage and includes a cross-country chase to apprehend the true criminal. Dorothy wrote the dialogue for a troupe of circus freaks—a bearded woman and Siamese twins. She and Hitchcock appear in the film together, as a couple driving along the highway in a car just as Robert Cummings is manhandling Priscilla Lane. “My,” Dorothy remarks, “they must be terribly in love.”
The rest of 1941 passed less pleasantly. Dorothy, in a sour mood, taunted Alan for enjoying Hollywood. She called his values low, trashy, and bourgeois, his principles “debased.” Remorseful, she later admitted that she had gone too far and “behaved like a shit to him,” but added tartly, “I had much right on my side, but I used all the wrong things.” Again they teamed together to work on a baseball film about Lou Gehrig, The Pride of the Yankees. They were making good money at the Goldwyn studio when Dorothy spied an opportunity to yank the rug from under Alan’s feet by getting herself dismissed from the picture. Figuring that “alan” without “dotty” would certainly have to take up begging at Hollywood and Vine, she sat back and waited for Goldwyn to fire Alan. It was a prospect that gave her great satisfaction, but something went wrong.
The studio decided to keep Alan and replace Dorothy with Helen Deutsch, a short-story writer and former newspaper reporter who was working in pictures for the first time. Deutsch had no idea what had preceded her arrival. “I was too green to know the score, although somebody told me that Dorothy Parker had got stinking drunk and had been taken off the picture. All I knew was that Alan Campbell was there every day and Parker wasn’t.” Alan, she decided, was “a cute guy but creepy”—he shaved after he arrived at the office and spent hours leaning out the window. When she noticed him watching the story editor, Deutsch wondered if “they weren’t a couple of homosexuals and Alan was in love with him.”
It pleased Dorothy to imagine herself as the victim in this situation. The studio had had the nerve to replace her with a pretty thirty-five-year-old unpracticed screenwriter who was making only three hundred dollars a week. Helen Deutsch was soon earning three thousand a week and she wrote a string of successful films including National Velvet, Lili, and I’ll Cry Tomorrow. Adopting an appropriately offended attitude, Dorothy began to imagine that Alan was having an affair with Helen Deutsch. Though not true in this case, she herself had always found creative collaboration impossible without sex. It seemed as likely a theory as any, and it gave her another reason to increase her consumption of brandy.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of war in December, Dorothy became increasingly difficult to live with. She began the day with a morning eye-opener and drank steadily until bedtime or a blackout, whichever happened to come first. Alan affected not to notice. Dorothy checked herself into a hospital to dry out. Alan’s uncharacteristic response contrasted with his habit of automatically jumping to her rescue, a reaction that in no way denoted acknowledgment of her alcoholism. In fact, the reverse was true. While he could hardly deny that sometimes she over-drank, he did not recognize it as an uncontrollable compulsion. He was unwilling to endorse her stopping and drank along with her so that she might have company. Without meaning to, he encouraged her drinking with his collection of recipes for unusual cocktails, with expensive ice crushers and bar paraphernalia. Joseph Bryan cannot remember Dorothy ever preparing a drink for herself. “She would just hold out her glass, and Alan would jump up to refill it.”
Like many who live in alcoholic families, Alan found it natural to assume a custodial role. He accepted his wife’s tendency to overreact, feel sorry for herself, and embrace the victim’s role. Not only did he tolerate her selfishness, but also he shut his eyes when she showed indifference toward his interests. He was finally getting fed up. Nothing he did pleased her, and when he responded to her peevish moods with impatience she called him “a cross little man.”
While Dorothy was in the hospital, Laura and Sid Perelman busily carried olive branches between the warring parties:
Our old friend Dotnick has been in something of a spin—loaded on brandy by eleven in the morning and the like. She clearly resents Alan working with Miss Helen Deutsch, she’s fed up with pictures and picture people, and by Thursday of this past week, she had got herself into such shape that she had to go off to a sanitarium for three or four days. All through this, Alan was phoning us at the studio and running in to our apartment biting his nails and telling us how unreasonable she was.
The Perelmans paid a call on Dorothy. Wan and sober, she announced her readiness to chuck the marriage and return to New York for good. They conveyed this threat to Alan, who predictably rushed to her side, humbled himself, and patched up the quarrel. “As of last night,” Sid notified the Goetzes, “they were home together again, but it’s hardly Paola [sic] and Francesca.”
Seeing them together brought to Sid Perelman’s mind the image of a cobra and a mongoose. It was more true than he realized. Ever since war had been declared, Dorothy had been testing Alan in new and provocative ways. To prove that he loved her, she wanted him to join the army. She had warned him a thousand times about the evils of Fascism. Now the whole world was in flames and “there were men getting their balls shot off, and here he was in Beverly Hills.” Were she a man, she knew that she would enlist. “She would say very rough things to him,” remembered a friend.
Her demand was outrageous because Alan, at thirty-eight, could easily have avoided serving in the armed forces. Despite his education at Virginia Military Institute, which had been Horte’s idea, he had always shown more interest in perfecting the art of making chocolate soufflés than in warfare. He made a confession to Dorothy: He had hated military school. After practically starving to death as an actor, he was now flourishing in his career as a screenwriter and had no desire to throw it away by joining the army.
Excuses like these made Dorothy livid. She was not suggesting he go to the Ukraine and join the Red Army, only to be a patriot and defend his country.
Alan, however, was oblivious to such taunts. He couldn’t go to war because he had to install a new chimney at Fox House, and that was that.
Throughout the winter of 1942, hectored almost without letup, Alan gnawed his already bitten fingernails and increased his drinking. Now that neither one seemed to be in control, some of their friends began avoiding them. Regular drinking companions like screenwriters Phoebe and Henry Ephron suddenly claimed to be spending a great deal of time in Palm Springs. Henry Ephron felt the Campbells were a bad influence. “We were working very hard and they would want to stop in every night to sit around and drink, then at the end of the evening we’d have to drive them and their car home. We just had to drop them. It came to a point where we’d put the cars in the garage and the lights out, so it would look as if we weren’t at home.”
But the Campbells were too absorbed in their own high drama to be hurt. Alan probably enjoyed the game as much as Dorothy. These months may well have been among the most spicy of their entire marriage. Tantalizing her, Alan told Dorothy about movie people who were being commissioned as majors or colonels and said that if he should ever decide to join up he would want a commission. This elitist idea sent Dorothy into a frenzy.
At last, in the spring of 1942, Alan made up his mind to enlist as a private. By now the battles they had waged on the subject were so plentiful that it was easy for Alan to forget that enlisting had been Dorothy’s idea. Wisely, his victorious wife did not remind him. She assured Aleck Woollcott that “no one had told him what was right, except himself,” that he had enlisted “without telling one soul.” This scenario may have fooled Woollcott, but those who knew better were incredulous. Dorothy, having got her way, full of respect for her husband, was feeling intensely satisfied. When she repeatedly spoke of how much she loved him, she meant it sincerely.
Alan’s plans stunned his mother. After confusing the issue by calling him heartless and inconsiderate, she rounded up a delegation of Point Pleasant matrons who descended on the farm like vigilantes to try to talk Alan out of leaving “that poor sick woman all alone.” When this failed, Horte faked a heart attack. Dorothy, furious, reminded herself that she had never been a vengeful woman. Her philosophy was that if you had patience “the bastards will get theirs and it will be fancier than anything you could ever have thought up. But I would ... give quite a large bit of my soul if something horrible would happen to that woman for poisoning Alan’s last days here.” Whether by “here” she meant Pipersville or the planet earth is ambiguous.
Among those praising Alan’s decision as deeply courageous was Gerald Murphy, who presented him with a wristwatch engraved with the admiring but melodramatic inscription, QUI SENSAT ACET [He who feels, acts].
This proved far too high-toned for Robert Benchley, who wisecracked that the watch should have read WHOSE WIFE FEELS, ACTS.