Chapter 15
1942-1947
In the first days of Alan’s absence, she attempted to minimize her loneliness by drawing closer to her family. She first called her sister, who was separated from her second husband and living with her daughter in East Patchogue, Long Island. Informed of Alan’s departure, Helen neglected to offer the sort of commiseration that Dorothy expected and instead reported how the war was affecting East Patchogue that summer. A few of the Saturday night dances had been canceled.
Dorothy next telephoned Bert, who still worked in the garment business as a dress salesman. When she dialed his home in Queens, she got her sister-in-law. Mate affected to find nothing exceptionable about Alan’s enlistment because, she explained, he was a college graduate. Her son Bertram, only a year younger than Alan, would like to train in aviation, but had no college degree. When Dorothy interrupted to say that Alan had enlisted as a private, Mate changed the subject. By the time Dorothy hung up, she was cursing to herself.
Despite her fame, there had been no real alteration in the Rothschild family roles over the years. To them, she was still the clever little sister, a source of pride and pleasure. Dorothy, for her part, continued to scorn their tributes on the grounds that they could not be trusted to judge her worth or even to fathom her thinking. Despite her complaints about the Rothschilds, she in fact considered Bert “not bad,” actually high praise from her, and she expressed her deep-rooted affection for Helen by her usual generosity. Her niece Lel recalled that, whenever she visited the
Algonquin as a child, her mother would warn her “not to admire anything Aunt Dot is wearing because she’ll take it off her back and give it to you.” During Lei’s adolescence, Dorothy bought her a squirrel coat. On her marriage to Robert Iveson, she gave her the Cartier diamond watch that once had been a gift from Seward Collins. (The watch, now owned by Lel’s daughter Nancy Arcaro, has become a family heirloom.)
Failing to find comfort in her family, Dorothy holed up at Fox House to redesign a life without Alan. She was determined to pull her socks up and prove her competency: “I’ve got to write a lot of stories—if, of course, I can. I’ve got the farm to keep going. I’ve got myself. I’ve got Alan’s mother.” It occurred to her that she should undertake some kind of factory work, perhaps welding, but quickly abandoned the idea as impractical. Still, a nine-to-five civilian job remained a possibility, a position like the one she had at Vanity Fair during the last war, when a regular routine had helped pass the time. Before Alan left, he strongly advised against her living at the farm because anyone “who cannot drive a car, much less make coffee” would be better off in Manhattan. He spoke to a friend who managed the luxurious Ritz Hotel about giving her a good rate on a suite. Even if she did take a place in town, she wrote Woollcott, she intended to make periodical visits to Pipersville as often as the hired man could spare the gas to meet her at the station.
Mapping out a strategy was simple. Living it was harder. In mid-September, after moving to the Ritz, she telephoned Harold Ross to ask for a job. Not a writing assignment, she explained, but a staff position. While Ross was struggling to comprehend the idea, which he did not for a moment take seriously, she went on to say that she was living at the Ritz, and she argued that it was costly but not unreasonably so, indeed there were hidden benefits that actually made it a bargain. Her logic must have struck him as sounding like a miracle on the order of the fishes and the loaves, and since publishing a weekly magazine on a shoestring always had meant looking for “Jesuses” who might save his operation, he pricked up his ears. He later joked to Marc Connelly about making her head of the design and layout department. He heard nothing further from her. When he subsequently telephoned the Ritz, he never found her in, for the good reason that she was seldom there.
Alan took basic training at the Army Air Corps base in Miami Beach, where his barracks turned out to be a deluxe hotel that had been requisitioned for servicemen. Pulling KP duty in the dining hall, he was given the job of serving dessert to men coming through the chow line. One day while trying to spoon five canned cherries into each passing tin cup, he heard someone call him stingy and order him to pour in the whole can. Alan’s response was to hold up the line while he recounted to make sure he’d given the soldier no more than the regulation five. Glancing up, he was startled to see a familiar face, Broadway director Joshua Logan. Immediately Alan invited him to his room because he wanted to give him some ashtrays. Logan said he had no need of ashtrays, but Alan insisted. Everybody in Miami Beach needed ashtrays, and he had been saving these for friends. Logan, as it happened, was the first one to come along. After that, they became friendly, and before Alan knew it he was having a a good time. Miami Beach seemed like a huge Hollywood soundstage with fake palm trees and a Technicolor moon. The place was full of tall, skinny, suntanned men in starched uniforms who looked like Jimmy Stewart and boogiewoogied around Miami singing, chewing Wrigley’s, boozing, and living in comradely style in hotels that had colossal swimming pools and cocktail lounges full of girls with pompadours. The Army Air Corps, as anyone could plainly see, was a party, and Alan loved parties.
In November, he wasted no time in applying for Officer Candidate School. Josh Logan, who had not initially wanted the responsibility of being an officer, changed his mind and applied as a gesture of friendship. They were both accepted. Right before OCS graduation, anticipating the revels ahead once they were officers and able to live as they pleased, they rented a small apartment across the street from their hotel and stocked it with food and liquor.
Alan, quite popular in Squadron 24, soon won the reputation of being a wit. Practically nobody was aware that he was the husband of Dorothy Parker, and some had no idea who she was. Nor did they know or much care about his job in civilian life. During a physical examination that included a routine psychiatric interview, the doctor asked for his highest earnings as a civilian.
“Five thousand dollars,” Alan said.
“Five thousand dollars a year is all you made?” said the doctor.
“Five thousand dollars a week.”
The doctor stared a moment before asking, “Ever had any mental illness in the family?”
Dorothy’s first reaction to Alan’s application to Officer Candidate School had been annoyance. When he had written to ask the birthplace of her father for the OCS application, she had gotten obstructive. Alan later recalled that “trying to get the little woman to write a letter stating any facts about her old man was a career in itself.” Prior to the service, Alan would not have dared call Dorothy “the little woman.” He was beginning to sound less and less like a man who seemed to be content bringing up the rear in his marriage and professional life. Dorothy noticed this with considerable misgiving.
That fall she sped back and forth to Florida and parked there for a month in December. For all her good intentions, no new fiction got started, only a trite article for Mademoiselle urging its readers to become men for the duration and take the jobs left vacant by servicemen. She suggested, for example, that they drive buses, something she might have liked to do, just as she also talked about wanting to enlist in the WACs or become a war correspondent. These last ideas she mentioned so often that some people mistakenly concluded she had actually applied and been rejected as a premature antifascist.
Waiting for the inspiration to begin another short story, she was dismayed to learn that Ruth Gordon was writing a play with main characters who bore an unmistakable resemblance to herself and Alan. The plot of Over Twenty-one concerns a famous novelist-screenwriter whose husband is struggling through Officer Candidate School at the age of thirty-nine and—the resemblance ends here—her determination to help him. This was the third time that Gordon played her, and Dorothy was getting tired of watching others profit from her life story. Even though she herself had practically elevated procrastination to an art form, she adopted an offended tone, snarling that she didn’t dare write a play about her life because Ruth would very likely sue her for plagiarism.
Over Twenty-one opened on Broadway in January 1944. A great success, it was made into a film starring Irene Dunne.
Just before Alan graduated from Officer Candidate School, he and Josh Logan organized a celebration for their friends at the rented apartment. Logan later figured their guests must have consumed more liquor than usually was drunk in all of Miami at the height of the tourist season. Unfortunately, he and Alan were scheduled to appear on a GI radio program the next morning. With Dorothy tottering along behind, they made their way to the station on one of the piers. Logan noticed that she looked wrecked—rheumy eyes, gray-green face, twitching cheeks. He felt sorry for her. Despite his preconceived notions about Dorothy’s being vitriolic, she seemed to him like “a beady-eyed dumpling” who needed care. Since fifteen minutes remained until air time, he offered to run back to one of the bars along the beach and get her anything she wished—“a double Scotch, a double rye, whatever. I might even find a bottle of gin.”
Despite his promises, he found it impossible to get off the pier and returned from the expedition with the only beverage he was able to buy, a bottle of Coca-Cola with a straw in it.
“How sweet,” Dorothy said. “Coca-Cola. I’ll try it. I’ve never had a Coca-Cola.” Accepting the soda, she sucked tentatively at the straw, then swallowed a larger slurp. Logan was anxious to know whether it was making her feel better.
“No, but as it was going down I learned a deep, abiding truth about drinking Coca-Cola.”
“What’s that?”
“Never send a boy on a man’s errand.”
Several weeks later, Dorothy was again in Miami when another verity appeared to her. She noticed that Alan seemed unusually distant. He no longer seemed interested in her, at least he was making no attempt to cater to her.
Nedda Harrigan, Logan’s future wife, was also there for the weekend, and they had another party. This time Logan observed that Dorothy and Alan seemed tense and unhappy. “They were terribly intimate, only it wasn’t cozy or jolly, more like a couple of vipers. Of course we were all drinking heavily, because that was standard procedure in the air force, but she was in a bad temper and later on they had a terrible fistfight.”
When Dorothy met Nedda Harrigan for lunch the next day, she had a black eye. Deeply humiliated, she refused to acknowledge the bruise and instead launched into an indignant recital of Alan’s misbehavior. He and Josh, she told Nedda bitterly, didn’t need them anymore because they had their war. She finally pointed to her face. “A beloved little mouse below my eye. That’s not very pretty, is it? Not very pretty at all.”
Nedda Harrigan urged Dorothy not to take the quarrel seriously. War was difficult for everyone, and besides, they were all in the same boat.
Dorothy disagreed. “My boat,” she insisted, “is leaking.”
Violence had never entered her relationship with Alan. During the years when she had vilified him as a queer and a Vassar girl, he had mildly turned the other cheek, but he now fell on her in a fury. He reminded her that he had enlisted for her sake; now she was accusing him of desertion. No matter what he did, she was never satisfied.
Dorothy took the train back to New York.
In late January 1943, on a CBS radio broadcast, Aleck Woollcott was taking part in a discussion entitled “Is Germany Incurable?” when he pushed away from the microphone and printed on a scrap of paper, I AM SICK. A few hours later he was dead of a heart attack followed by a cerebral hemorrhage. Even though Dorothy had recently visited him in Lake Bomoseen and knew firsthand of his poor health, she still took it hard.
On the evening of his death, she hurried to the Algonquin and sat in a corner with Bea Stewart and Joseph Hennessey, Woollcott’s secretary. She was annoyed to notice that others had the same idea. When George and Beatrice Kaufman and a few more appeared, she nudged Bea. “We have the Round Table with us. Let’s get out of here.” A few days later, after a memorial service thronged by some five hundred of Woollcott’s friends, Dorothy joined the bereaved Round Tablers in the Rose Room for one last drink. Among those present were the Kaufmans, Neysa McMein, Peggy Leech, and several other ghosts from the past with whom she had fallen out over the years. Looking warily around, she saw people who had been her dearest companions in the old days, friends who never had been at a loss for words, but now there was uneasy silence. They had utterly nothing to say to each other. Harpo Marx found it equally eerie and recalled that “it was the last gathering of the Woollcott crowd, and it was our strangest gathering.”
Shortly after this alarming reunion, Dorothy fled New York. Somerset Maugham had invited her to spend a few weeks in South Carolina, where he was living on the estate of his publisher, Nelson Doubleday. Dorothy made the mistake of accepting impulsively. It was a curious invitation because they barely knew each other. They had, in fact, met only once at a Hollywood dinner party given by Fanny Brice. Dorothy, seated next to Maugham, found herself feeling uncharacteristically intimidated and thought that “whenever I meet one of these Britishers I feel as if I have a papoose on my back.” When Maugham proposed she compose a poem for him, she cheerfully agreed to perform. A paper and pencil were requested and Dorothy wrote:
Higgledy Piggledy, my white hen;
She lays eggs for gentlemen.
That was very nice, Maugham said. He had always liked those lines. Giving him a cool smile, she completed the verse:
You cannot persuade her with gun or lariat
To come across for the proletariat.
Maugham chuckled with delight. There was no one around in South Carolina but Maugham and a number of sycophantic young men who were devoted to their host but regarded Dorothy with indifference. All Maugham wanted to do was play bridge. Although Dorothy later called him “that old lady” and “a crashing bore,” she concealed her ennui and her tongue. Feeling miserable anyway, she spent three weeks playing cards with Maugham. A year later, as if to prove that virtue does indeed have its own reward, Maugham wrote, for $250, a glowing introduction to her collected works, The Portable Dorothy Parker.
Back in New York, her distress over Woollcott’s death failed to subside with time. More than two years later, when Samuel Hopkins Adams wrote a well-received biography of Woollcott, she felt sufficiently upset to offer a dissenting opinion. In an article for the Chicago Sun Book Week, she scorned the book as only sporadically accurate and said that she smelled “a strange little underlay of meanness all through it.” She went on to flay George Kaufman and Moss Hart for distorting Woollcott’s personality in their play The Man Who Came to Dinner, which was, she declared hotly, a “nasty little play.”
In 1943, Woollcott had been fifty-six and Dorothy turned fifty. His early death does not seem extraordinary considering his obesity and accompanying ailments, but Dorothy refused to make such connections and felt shaken by what she considered his premature passing. With great reluctance, she had stopped pretending to be Alan’s age. Suddenly she regretted never having lied about her age. On the other hand, she joked, all she might have subtracted were three or four years and “what’s a couple of sandspits to an archipelago?”
She disliked the bodily decay of aging, but the cause of her distress was far more complex: She was forced to reevaluate her thinking on death, a subject she had adopted long ago as her peculiar speciality. She did still enjoy making morbid wisecracks. She said she wanted a large, white tombstone because it would give her “something to live for.”
She claimed it was the word middle in middle-age that she hated, because it branded her a frump. She wanted to skip her fifties and get to the seventies and eighties. “People ought to be one of two things, young or old. No; what’s the good of fooling? People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.” Suddenly the passage of time terrified her. She wondered if she really did seek death. She who had never feared death and had busily cultivated her demise was startled to realize a ghastly fact: She would not be around forever to carry on her flirtation with nonexistence. What she recognized was a truth about herself so depressing that it almost made her feel like killing herself.
Woollcott’s death had angered and saddened her, but it was nothing compared to her acute shock in November 1945, when Robert Benchley died unexpectedly. Like Woollcott, he too was fifty-six. He had been visiting Gertrude in Scarsdale when he suffered a series of nosebleeds that could not be controlled. When Marc Connelly heard he had fallen into a coma, he hurried hatless and coatless to the Stork Club, a favorite saloon of Benchley’s, and rushed from table to table asking patrons for their blood types. Those whose blood type matched Benchley’s were immediately whisked off to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital to provide transfusions. Benchley died from a cerebral hemorrhage, complicated by cirrhosis of the liver.
When she was notified of his death in Hollywood, Dorothy cried out, “That’s dandy!” Her words offended Gertrude Benchley, whose hostility toward Dorothy had remained strong. Misinterpreting her words as indifference, she never forgave her.
Despite a breach after her marriage, Benchley remained one of the most important people in her life. She loved him in a special way. When Benchley’s son Nathaniel began collecting material for a biography of his father in the 1950s, she showed little interest in the project and cooperated minimally with requests for her recollections. Probably she was convinced that any authorized biography of Robert Benchley would be well sterilized.
After Benchley’s death, John O’Hara decided that “the party was over,” which was not strictly true because it was already breaking up in 1929, not long after he arrived in New York. The Round Table’s legend was so powerful that the group was believed to be alive fifteen years after its demise. In the minds of the nostalgic, it lasted even longer.
Whenever people asked Frank Case what had become of the Algonquin Round Table, he shrugged and replied, “What became of the reservoir at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street? These things do not last forever.” Edna Ferber realized the party was over when she arrived at the Rose Room in 1932 and found the big table occupied by a family from Newton, Kansas. Dorothy was happy to spread malicious stories about the Round Tablers. At her mildest, she described them as a pack of hypocrites and show-offs who “came there to be heard by one another. ‘Did you hear what I said last night?’ ”
Still, the unexpected deaths of Woollcott and Benchley had a profound effect on her and on some of the others, perhaps because it brought them face to face with their own mortality and other disagreeable subjects. In 1919, young and unproved, their goal had been to have it all—love, money, fame, and happiness. Twenty-five years later, they were still hoping for happiness and wondering why fame had failed to satisfy. To their great shock, they now were reminded that it was quite possible to drop dead without finding it. In their time, no American had been more famous—and more unfulfilled—than Alexander Woollcott. Three decades later he was forgotten, “famous mostly for being famous,” as a critic aptly commented.
Robert Benchley, beloved as he had been, had seen happiness elude him. He slumped into a decline before he died. Sleeping pills kept him awake at night, and the Benzedrine he took on the set made him sleepy. Finally, he gave up the Benzedrine because he could think of no important reason for wanting to be awake. Before the war, Dorothy had attended a Hollywood party where the guests had included Benchley and Robert Sherwood. Benchley went haywire. Pointing at Sherwood, who had recently won a second Pulitzer Prize for his drama Idiot’s Delight, he cringed in horror and cried out, “Those eyes—I can’t stand those eyes looking at me. He’s looking at me and thinking of how he knew me when I was going to be a great writer ... And he’s thinking now look at what I am.” Sherwood later admitted that those might very well have been his thoughts. When Harold Ross felt obliged to fire Benchley as The New Yorker theater critic, he deputized St. Clair McKelway to deliver the bad news. Benchley, quickly sensing the reason for the meeting, told McKelway he understood perfectly and ordered another round of drinks.
Many of those associated with the Round Table were destined to live shorter-than-average lives. Ring Lardner, suffering from alcoholism and tuberculosis, died of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight. During his last years his face resembled a skull, and his trembling fingers could not light a match. Ruth Hale died suddenly when she was forty-seven, and Heywood Broun followed her at fifty-one.
Since all of them, with few exceptions, were what would now be termed substance abusers, the problems they suffered are not surprising. Although Dorothy was the only one to attempt suicide, the rest selected alternate roads to self-damage, just as Dorothy herself did in the latter part of her life. Woollcott gorged himself into his grave with an early-Renaissance appetite for mountainous quantities of food; he adored creamy, calorie-loaded cocktails (he claimed the Brandy Alexander was named for him) and drank untold cups of coffee, although during rare periods of moderation he cut down to nineteen cups a day.
The others simply drank. Benchley’s friends choked when they watched him adding vodka to chocolate ice-cream sodas.
“Bob,” Scott Fitzgerald said after he had gone on the wagon, “don’t you know that drinking is slow death?”
Benchley had a ready answer. “So who’s in a hurry?”
Charles MacArthur, despite a stable second marriage to the long-suffering Helen Hayes, died of an internal hemorrhage after being hospitalized for nephritis and anemia. He was sixty and looked eighty. Eventually Heywood Broun’s hands shook and his nose reddened, although during the years when he had sedated himself with a flask of warm gin, his alcoholism had not been particularly noticeable. John O’Hara had recurrent drinking problems. Edmund Wilson, who was hospitalized during periods of manic-depression, also was afflicted by alcoholism. Enthroned on a divan in the Algonquin lobby, he ordered double martinis or double bourbons one after another, conducted brilliant, completely coherent conversations, but sometimes fell flat on his face when he got up to leave.
Frank Adams also drank too much, but it was the early stages of an Alzheimer’s-type disorder that caused his deterioration. In the late 1930s, the rhyming wit of the World became the host of a popular radio panel show, Information Please. When it made the transition to television, he was slipping mentally and had to be replaced after two performances because of complaints that he looked like a death’s-head. After Esther divorced him, which he never was able to admit, he lived at the Players Club, where it saddened fellow guests to witness his senile rambling and his intoxication. His son Timothy thought that “he aged quite prematurely. In his early sixties he looked like an old man and by the time he died at seventy-eight, he was ancient.” During F.P.A.’s final years in a nursing home, where he watched television and read paperback novels, he would have been destitute had not Harold Ross and William Shawn kept him on The New Yorker payroll at a modest stipend.
Those Round Tablers not afflicted by alcoholism had other crippling problems that made happiness difficult to sustain. Few of them managed to find satisfaction in love or marriage. Marc Connelly, after years of frustration over his unrequited passion for Margalo Gillmore, finally married a Mack Sennett bathing beauty, Madeline Hurlock, only to watch her fall in love with one of his best friends, Robert Sherwood, who himself had been trapped in a turbulent sadomasochistic marriage with Mary Brandon. George and Beatrice Kaufman, unable to have sex with each other, adopted a daughter and then went their separate ways emotionally, and a similar type of open-marriage arrangement was chosen by Neysa McMein and John Baragwanath. In 1928, Jane Grant divorced Harold Ross, who went on to marry twice again. The Round Tablers greeted Heywood Broun and Ruth Hale’s divorce with equanimity, but they could accept neither his remarriage to a dancer nor his conversion to Catholicism for her sake. Robert Benchley’s farcical marriage and his endless womanizing contrasted so vividly with his basic integrity and decency that practically everyone who knew him colluded in pretending that it was not happening. No doubt the worst hypocrite in this situation was Benchley himself, who continued to masquerade as an all-American, suburban family man until the end of his life. In the thirties, he had been a favorite lover of Tallulah Bankhead. Brendan Gill recalled that “she was always praising the size of his prick and telling everybody what a terrific ‘cocksman’ he was. An ordinary mortal, which Benchley was not, might have thought, ‘Yea! spread the word,’ but he simply couldn’t stand to hear it.” Edna Ferber and Aleck Woollcott sidestepped messy sexual complications by choosing celibacy.
The collective excesses of the Round Tablers made Dorothy’s problems appear unexceptional.
In 1943, Dorothy gave up her trips to Florida. Once Alan’s squadron had been transferred to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and then to Long Island, she saw practically nothing of him. When he did get a furlough, she was intent on making it perfect, which is to say, she usually managed to spoil it. As she admitted in “The Lovely Leave,” a short story she published in the Woman’s Home Companion, their meetings always ended in disaster. All it took was a single bitchy word from either to start a shoot-out, then they both turned glacial, and before she knew it, the door would be slamming behind him. “When she knew he was gone, she was cool and still no longer. She ran about the little flat, striking her breast and sobbing. Then she had two months to ponder what had happened, to see how she had wrought the ugly small ruin. She cried in the nights.”
She also cursed him in the nights. Once she sent a letter that seemed to be nothing but a half-dozen unrelated items of gossip about people they knew. At the end she added a postscript, suggesting he look at the first letter of each sentence to decipher her real message. The letters spelled out FUCK YOU.
She seldom visited the farm. Wolfinger’s general store in Ottsville could generally count on unloading certain brands of toilet paper merely by mentioning it was used by Mrs. Parker, but now the toilet paper had to sell on its own merits. She moved to the New Weston, a residence hotel on the corner of Madison Avenue and Fiftieth Street, where she had a pleasant two-room apartment. She made it homier by bringing from the country a few pieces of furniture and one or two precious possessions—a Utrillo landscape and a cocktail shaker engraved with the words TO ROBERT BENCHLEY FROM HIS SUNDAY SCHOOL CLASS.
Meanwhile, she was not the only one of her crowd to be alone. Lillian Hellman was in pretty much the same situation after Dashiell Hammett enlisted and was shipped to the Aleutian Islands. Hellman had adjusted to his absence. She was occupied with the film version of Watch on the Rhine and thinking of beginning a new play. Dorothy gave the appearance of being occupied. She worked for the Spanish Refugee Appeal, now part of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, and she made speeches on behalf of causes as diverse as Yugoslav relief, the rescue of European Jews, and children’s book week. When she volunteered to sell war bonds, the Treasury Department teamed her up with Ogden Nash and a young New Yorker editor just returned from New Guinea and sent them on a tour of Pennsylvania to visit schools. To E. J. Kahn, Jr., who had joined the magazine in 1937, Dorothy was a figure from another era. “At the New Yorker she was considered a great lady,” but in his twenty-seven-year-old eyes she appeared “small and faded, too world-weary to be witty.”
While Benchley was still alive, she made several trips to Hollywood. She would tell people that she was doing a picture with Gregory Ratoff, or she might name other producers. If it was true, there remains no record of such employment, no screen credits. She stayed at the Garden of Allah. In Benchley’s bungalow, the bar never closed.
Dorothy insisted that Helen come out and visit. Due to wartime travel restrictions, it was an exhausting train trip that meant sitting up for several nights. Dorothy took her sister to see the standard sights. They went to Romanoff’s and to the set of a Joan Crawford picture, and she introduced Helen to Marlene Dietrich and George Murphy. All the time Dorothy kept putting down the movie stars. “Everyone makes a swell fuss over Dot,” Helen wrote to her son Bill. “I can’t understand why she hates it so.” Although Dorothy outdid herself to show Helen a good time, Helen had difficulty with the pace and found it a relief to go home. “I seemed to be continually drinking. I really stood it beautifully, too. I was surprised at myself.”
In the fall of 1943, Dorothy returned to New York because Alan was due to be sent overseas, and she wanted to say good-bye. It was unbearable for her to admit that his life offered her no place. She felt deeply wounded that he was so obviously relieved to be free of her and suffered from intense, almost paranoid jealousy. His friends, the air corps, and the entire army of the United States disgusted her. It seemed as if he had gained a whole new life, but, “I have half an old one,” she wrote, feeling deprived. The thought of Alan having any kind of existence separate from hers made her furious, and knowing that it was she who had forced him to enlist made it even worse.
After he left in November, she rushed back to the Garden of Allah to spend the Christmas holidays with her Hollywood friends, but she was in a smoldering mood. At nine o’clock on Christmas morning she knocked on the door of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, wanting company. This was extraordinarily early for her to be up, and since she looked queasy, it was likely she had never been to bed. She told them that Alan’s checkbook stubs had revealed spending fifteen thousand dollars on a bracelet for Miriam Hopkins. Since this information failed to jibe with her portrayal of him as a dedicated pederast, the Hacketts were understandably perplexed.
In the evening, she turned up with two photographs of Alan in uniform and asked the Hacketts which one they preferred. When they reluctantly made a choice, she presented them with both photos, frames and all.
Helen suffered a minor stroke that left her with diminished sensation in her hands, and then developed pneumonia. On January 18, 1944, she died at the age of fifty-seven. Bill Droste wired Dorothy of his mother’s death. She wired back immediately, saying that she would be unable to get back East in time for the funeral, but wished to pay for the burial expenses. She asked Bill to order a blanket of roses to cover the coffin. He replied that, while Helen had expressly forbidden flowers, they would gladly accept her offer to pay for the funeral.
Dorothy was stunned. Her customary manner of dealing with death was to wire Toni Strassman at The Viking Press and direct her to order cut flowers to be charged to her royalty account. Her offer of flowers having been rejected, she did not know what to do. The Drostes heard nothing more from her.
“We guessed she was annoyed with us,” said Marge Droste. “We didn’t get the blanket of roses, and she never paid for the funeral.”
Three months after Helen’s death, Bert Rothschild died suddenly. Since Dorothy had not been as close to him and Mate, it was easier to bear. As for her eldest brother, nobody had heard from poor Harry in thirty-five years. She had stopped speculating long ago on whether he was dead or alive. Helen’s passing threw her off balance.
William Targ, an editor with World Publishing in Cleveland, was not only an admirer of Dorothy’s but an exceptionally personable man. For more than a year, he pursued her with a proposal that she edit an anthology of women writers. He was confident she could do it because the volume would require a minimum of writing, only brief critical introductions to the writers. He finally enticed her into accepting.
Whenever Targ came to New York, he called Dorothy to inquire about her progress, and they would meet for dinner at the New Weston. Claiming to be working hard, she pointed to a sheet of paper in her typewriter.
“You see that?” she said with a reassuring smile. “That’s a page of your book.” It was a lie, but not one that he cared to challenge, any more than he objected when she broke appointments with telegrams full of absurd excuses. She had German measles, or she had to fly to Amsterdam.
One rainy evening, she and her poodle Misty paid a call on Targ at the Warwick Hotel. As usual, she chain-smoked her Chesterfields, played with her dinner, and showed an unquenchable thirst for martinis. When it was time to leave, she was tremendously plastered. Targ wanted to take her home in a cab, but she refused. At the curb, as they began to argue, she donned her aristocratic manners. Targ pointed out that she had no coat or umbrella and it was pouring rain. Dragging the sleepy Misty behind her, she disappeared into the storm and left Targ standing there soaking wet.
Facing reality, Targ decided that “she wasn’t capable of doing any work that she cared to see in print.” That was a tactful way to describe it.
Dorothy felt as if she were being gnawed by “a great, grey rat,” a rat whose name was Captain Alan Campbell. In London with Air Force Intelligence, Alan had yet to come within sniffing distance of a battlefield. Judging by the exhilarated tone of his letters, Dorothy concluded that he was having a lovely time. It seemed wrong somehow to be enjoying a war so much.
Toward the spring of 1944, she first began to worry about small, cryptic hints in his references to dinner party invitations and weekends spent whizzing about the English countryside to palatial homes. At first she ignored the hints, but they became impossible to disregard. Every now and then names were mentioned; she began to wonder if Alan might be sleeping with someone. She had not expected him to remain celibate all this time. Men would be men, she supposed, and “when were soldiers true?” She wrote a poem, her last, gingerly giving him permission to sleep with anybody he liked and emphasizing that he should not feel guilty about it either. She simply had one request:
Only, for the nights that were,
Soldier, and the dawns that came,
When in sleep you turn to her
Call her by my name.
After VE Day, Alan was stationed in Paris for a time, but he returned to London. He wrote Dorothy that he had fallen in love with another woman, a titled and wealthy aristocrat. This was supposed to be a secret because the woman was married and had three children. According to Alan she was passionately in love with him.
Dorothy was completely taken by surprise. Her immediate reaction was to panic, drink, and slide into a black hole of gloom. She consulted a psychiatrist for a time, but it failed to help, probably because she regarded therapists as quacks. In this crisis, Toni Strassman, Harold Guinzburg’s former secretary who had become a literary agent, often held her hand. A kindhearted woman with no family responsibilities of her own, Strassman lived nearby and was willing to slip over to the New Weston to keep her company for whole evenings. Since Strassman knew Alan, she was a logical confidante to whom Dorothy could unburden her feelings about the Englishwoman, whose existence she wanted to conceal from her friends. Dorothy assured Strassman that she was having a nervous breakdown: She related anecdotes about her psychiatrist, alluded to powerful medications, and claimed to be receiving electroshock treatments. Since she looked half-dead, Strassman assumed she was telling the truth.
Only after Dorothy’s fury against Alan began to flow did her depression slowly depart. She had two and a half years to come to terms with his bombshell, because he took his time returning after the war. Although he told her he planned to divorce and remarry, some of his friends wondered if he seriously meant it. They knew that he and his woman friend were fond of each other, got on extremely well, and shared a number of tastes, including an interest in furniture and decoration, but they doubted that the affair would result in marriage. Josh Logan interpreted it as a threat to remind Dorothy how much she needed him. “Alan expected her to plead with him to come home.” Before the war, he had a great need to punish her, and his English romance was a ready-made way to achieve this end.
For a time, Dorothy’s biggest fear was that the Englishwoman would want to marry Alan. When she decided she never wanted to see him again, she feared that the woman would not. That Alan might fall in love with another woman had not seriously occurred to her. Marriage to him had entailed a number of indignities, including the sly smiles of those who had ridiculed her for marrying a chorus boy. She had been responsible for placing him in a false light and telling people he was gay. She had built the myth of his homosexuality so carefully that she herself had nearly come to believe it. Even in the late fifties, she blithely remarked to Charles Addams, “I can compete with the girls, but not the boys.” The Englishwoman was no boy.
By the fall of 1946, for reasons never clear to her, Alan’s affair seemed to be wearing thin; suddenly he wrote that he was coming home. Dorothy did not answer. In desperation, he contacted Toni Strassman, asking her to act as intermediary, to reassure Dottie that he would be back soon. Dorothy’s pride would not permit her to forgive him or to take him back. She decided it was time he earned his own living. She intended to divorce him.
Alan returned to New York on November 13. The following spring, he was in Las Vegas. In this rite of passage, both he and Dorothy charged mental cruelty. Despite his residence in Nevada, Alan insisted that he did not want a divorce, which no doubt was the truth. It was the war that had made them strangers and destroyed their marriage, he believed. “I’m sorry it’s over,” he told newspaper reporters. “We had a wonderful time.” He assured his family that Dottie was still the love of his life. To his uncle he said: “I can’t live without her and I can’t live with her. Now what am I going to do about it, Roy?” Roy Eichel, a bachelor, could offer no advice.
The farm was put up for sale. Furnishings were divided, although there was little Dorothy wished to keep except the Utrillo and a Picasso gouache. The rest was either stored at Horte’s house in Point Pleasant or moved into the city to furnish Alan’s new duplex on East Sixty-second Street. Some of his decorating could not be removed—for example, the blueprint wallpaper in the upstairs hallway, labeled “A Country Residence for Mr. and Mrs. Alan Campbell,” which finally began to buckle in the 1980s and had to be removed by the farm’s present owner. The mirrors lining the dining room windows remained and the statue of Bacchus continued to stand sentinel in the garden.
Both Dorothy and Alan handled the divorce quite well. Throughout the unpleasant task of dismantling their marriage, they maintained cordial relations. Dorothy finally stopped referring to Alan as “a shit and a queer.” Although they seldom saw each other, the Christmas after the divorce they spent a rare evening together at the theater and went to the Stork Club afterward. The name of the play was appropriate: Crime and Punishment.