Chapter 16
1948-1955
Tall with dark eyes and hair, Rosser Lynn Evans was thirty-one years old. Alan had been responsible for introducing him to Dorothy in Miami Beach, where Evans had been in Officer Candidate School with Alan and Josh Logan. In 1942, she had paid Evans no attention, except to notice that he was a two-fisted drinker who always seemed to be drunker than she was. According to Logan, Evans not only seemed to be drunker, he was. “He was a confirmed alcoholic who would just go silly with liquor. Once we got him through a mapmaking examination by cheating for him. It was an awful thing to do to the United States Air Force but he was a nice guy and we liked him.”
After the war, Evans was working in New York as a radio announcer when Dorothy encountered him at a party. His confession that he aspired to writing a novel caught her interest. She told him that she hoped to write an historical play about Mary and Charles Lamb but hadn’t yet found a collaborator. Was he interested? This was her all-purpose cocktail party conversational gambit, but it was fresh to Evans. Unable to distinguish Lambs from lamb chops, he tried to hide his ignorance. Later he described himself as “dazed. Me collaborate? I’d have been glad just to sharpen her pencils.”
Dorothy had no need of a pencil sharpener or an alcoholic radio announcer with a secret passion to write. At the same time, she could not deny that big, good-looking, available men were rare.
There were quite a few raised eyebrows among Dorothy’s friends, who thought he was handsome—“a beautiful hunk of Victor Mature” said Bea Stewart—but not overly bright. Since he continued to wear his air-force shoes, they tagged him Li’l Abner, but the shoes had little to do with the nickname. Compared with Alan, Josh Logan said, “Ross Evans lacked talent, flair, and strength. Leaning against him must have been like leaning on a tower of Jell-0.” Yet Dorothy needed to touch him. “She was constantly pawing him, couldn’t keep her hands off him,” another friend noticed.
Ross Evans, after graduating from Tenafly (New Jersey) High School, had worked as a messenger in the garment district before winning a swimming scholarship to Franklin and Marshall College, where he majored in English. He had married before the war but was now divorced. Unlike Alan, he had no interest in domesticity and thought of himself as an athlete, having once been diving champion at the Newark Athletic Club. He still had a muscular body, but liquor was beginning to take its toll.
Since Ross was an agreeable drinking companion, Dorothy felt comfortable with him. He was soon living with her at the New Weston. She thought him splendidly masculine, well built, and sexy and looked forward to a refurbished sex life. At the outset, like a false springtime, there was a brief flurry of activity. Then weeks and sometimes months would pass without Evans’s exhibiting the slightest interest in sex, a not-unusual pattern with heavy drinkers. She took pleasure in publicly punishing him by announcing to a room full of guests at a party that “Rossie” would not sleep with her. She may not have been as troubled as she claimed. Late at night, engulfed in the pleasant fumes of Courvoisier, often falling into bed and passing out, she could not be bothered with sex either. When Evans did happen to be seized by an amorous urge, he sometimes acted on it forthwith, regardless of time and place. Once, while visiting friends, he began making love to Dorothy on their living room sofa. Dorothy thought it was funny, but apologized afterward to her red-faced hosts.
Since Evans had an urgent need to see his name in lights, he kept pressuring her to work so that he might accumulate a few joint bylines. Dorothy was in no hurry to oblige. When Cosmopolitan magazine sent around a scout to see if she could be talked into writing a story, she invited Aaron Hotchner up for a drink, even though writing fiction for Cosmopolitan was hardly something she had been longing to do. Ross, definitely a participant in the negotiations, swaggered around making highballs, attempted to speak for both of them, and frequently used the pronoun we. There was no doubt that he was eager to accept the Cosmo proposition.
Meanwhile, sophisticated in the ways of publishers demanding her blood, Dorothy was playing hard to get. She said that her writing joints had probably atrophied from disuse. As she began her third highball, she expressed doubt whether she could get back to the typewriter, it had been so long.
“Don’t worry about that,” Evans piped up. “I’ll handle the typewriter.” The way he loomed over her, legs bent and chin thrust out, reminded Hotchner of a paratrooper standing at parade rest.
Evans was absent the next time Hotchner came by to discuss his proposal. When he suggested having lunch downstairs in the dining room, Dorothy hesitated and explained that she was six months behind in her rent. She didn’t dare leave her room for fear of running into the manager. Hotchner, feeling sorry for her, promised protection and assurances that the lobby at noontime would no doubt be crowded. As they cruised by the reception desk, however, a voice called out, “Mrs. Parker! May we see you a moment?”
Out bustled a receptionist who delivered a stack of uncollected mail, among which there turned out to be a check.
In the dining room, the captain came to the table for their order four times. Dorothy downed three highballs before being forced to select a lunch that she did not eat. She asked Hotchner if Cosmopolitan would accept a dual byline and described Evans as a person who kept her from drinking while she worked. The story she outlined to Hotchner was about a newly married couple, recently returned from their honeymoon, who were hosting a dinner party for his friends. Throughout the evening, which would include an elaborate dinner followed by parlor games, one of the guests (a former mistress of the man’s) lengthily reveals to the wife that her husband’s first wife had killed herself. Hotchner, who was being paid a three-hundred-dollar bonus for each famous author he bagged, didn’t much care what the story was about so long as Dorothy delivered a publishable manuscript.
If Dorothy had never before collaborated on a short story, neither had Evans ever written one. He proved to be a mediocre writer. Refusing to listen to her voice of experience, he plunged ahead like a maddened race-horse, with a predictable result. When “The Game” was finally pronounced finished by Evans, she felt like a Lhasa Apso who had just given birth to a Saint Bernard. She watched the great creature stagger to its feet and lumber off into the pages of the December 1948 Cosmopolitan. Except for perhaps the first few paragraphs, there was nothing about “The Game” that suggested its coauthor was Dorothy Parker.
She had been pulling Hotchner’s leg with her tale of atrophied writing joints. The truth was, she had not been as idle as she pretended. The previous year she and Frank Cavett had concocted a film treatment about an alcoholic wife. John Howard Lawson had subsequently based a screenplay on the treatment for Universal. Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman was a female version of The Lost Weekend with Susan Hayward effectively playing the Ray Milland role. It won Dorothy and Cavett an Academy Award nomination in 1947 for best original story and Hayward a best actress nomination. Hollywood gossip said that the film was based on the life of Bing Crosby’s wife Dixie Lee, an impression that Dorothy did nothing to correct. Although Smash-Up lost the best story Oscar to Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street, it garnered exceptionally good reviews and served as an announcement in the picture business that Dorothy could still turn out quality work, with or without the slave-driving Alan Campbell.
Throughout their screen-writing career, Dorothy and Alan had been represented by various Hollywood superagents like Leland Hayward and Zeppo Marx. In early 1948, mobilizing herself for action, Dorothy retained another top agent, Irving “Swifty” Lazar, to negotiate a contract for her at Twentieth Century-Fox. When she packed up and headed for the Coast, Ross Evans followed closely on her heels.
Chateau Marmont is a bogus turreted castle on Sunset Boulevard, a bit seedy in appearance, but in 1947 even the Garden of Allah had begun to look arthritic. Dorothy settled snugly into California hotel life and spent the winter working on her play about the mad Mary Lamb. Recreating Charles and Mary Lamb and their friends, a collection of manic-depressive Bohemians that included Coleridge and a hopped-up De Quincey, was thoroughly enjoyable. All her characters had comforting habits—opium, laudanum, brandy, homicide—that she understood and respected. With a title inspired by the mythical shore where Shakespeare shipwrecked Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night, The Coast of Illyria was based on the tormented life of Mary Lamb, who had fatally wounded her mother by planting a kitchen knife in her chest during a psychotic episode, and on Mary’s brother, Charles. Despite a sprinkling of humorous lines (Wordsworth is described as being “up to his rump in sunsets”), the play drew mainly on Dorothy’s painful psychological relationship with Alan. On top of this personal memoir, she superimposed the lives of the early nineteenth-century siblings—a brother and sister who needed each other too desperately to ever separate, drifting toward destruction as the woman’s recurrent attacks of insanity push the man further into alcoholism, attacks that in the end assure her total derangement.
In May 1948, she submitted the play to the Margo Jones repertory company in Dallas, a regional theater that presented quality productions of both new works and classics. It was July before she heard from Jones, a cautious response praising the play and expressing tentative interest in producing it. A month later it was scheduled for the 1949 season and its authors advanced a $150 royalty against five percent of the gross. Dorothy felt idiotically happy.
In 1948 and 1949, she attempted to recapture the success that she and Alan had achieved in Hollywood during the thirties. After her Oscar nomination for Smash-Up, she felt on top again. Suddenly there were job offers, money, a man. Lean times were over. Although Hollywood’s golden age was nearing its end, no one knew it. Television was not yet being taken seriously, and Hollywood remained the movie capital of the world as well as a writers’ fount of gold. Dorothy’s first assignment at Fox was to adapt Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan with Ross and Walter Reisch. Renamed The Fan, the picture was produced by Otto Preminger and starred George Sanders and Madeleine Carroll. Next, she turned her attention to an original screenplay called Rose-Lipped Girls, a title inspired by A. E. Housman’s poem. It was never sold. Aside from the title, nothing about this script survives. About the same time, MGM purchased one of her short stories, “The Standard of Living,” for twenty-five hundred dollars, and an independent producer optioned “Big Blonde,” to be filmed on location in New York’s garment center. Neither of these projects reached the screen.
In collaboration with Evans at Fox, she worked on a Loretta Young-Celeste Holm comedy about two nuns, Come to the Stable, and several other pictures for which they received no credit. Referring to a film intended for Humphrey Bogart, Evans joked, “We rarely think about the picture but when we do we think that we brought it up to gutter-level.” Professionally and personally, Ross was content to accept second place, which enabled them to avoid some of the power struggles that had impaired Dorothy’s relationship with Alan toward the end.
Dorothy had highly unrealistic expectations for The Coast of Illyria. In part these were fueled by Margo Jones, who praised it in terms usually reserved for events such as Halley’s comet. Not only did she predict a Broadway production, but she also practically promised its appearance at the Edinburgh Festival of Music and Drama with Flora Robson playing Mary Lamb. In letters to Dorothy and Ross, she addressed them as “you two cuties,” “you babies,” and similar terms of flattering endearment, a personal style that made Dorothy hyperventilate. Nevertheless, she was an old hand at playing this game and sent sweet replies. “Now we know that everything people who know you have said about you is true,” she purred, a statement open to more than one reading, and she assured Jones that when they finally met she would no doubt “hug you to death.”
The Coast of Illyria opened in April 1949, for a three-week run. Arriving for the opening, Dorothy was an object of curiosity for actors and audiences alike. During intermissions, she fled the theater. She hated people coming up to her, and atheist that she was, acknowledged compliments by grunting, “Bless you,” so that she would appear friendly. At the curtain, she received a standing ovation. “Cries for author were universal and genuine. A shaky Miss Parker and a pale Mr. Evans arose from sheltered corner seats in Section B,” the Dallas Morning News reported. Ross, who had thus far seemed content to be treated as Dorothy’s luggage bearer, babbled to a Time reporter: “We’ve tasted blood. We don’t want to do anything ever again except write for the theater.” Dallas critics called Illyria the best play of the season and compared it favorably to Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, which had also received its premiere by Margo Jones.
When Dorothy returned to Hollywood, her moment in the sun over, it was to the heat of a California summer at the Chateau Marmont. Weekends, she and Evans drove to Malibu or Arrowhead, but mostly their life settled into a routine: studio jobs, revisions on The Coast of Illyria, discussion of ideas for another play, a modern work this time because she didn’t want to be typecast as writing exclusively about the Romantics. By now, there had been an addition to their household, a boxer named Flic, who was a few months old when they got him. Flic turned out to be an affectionate but timid animal who was terrified of just about everybody and everything. Dorothy, giving him the benefit of the doubt, decided that he must have been mistreated by his previous owners and began a program of assertive-ness training. It didn’t work. Norman Mailer urged her to bring Flic over to meet his dog, a large, black, ferocious German shepherd, apparently on the theory that if Flic could manage to make friends with Karl, he would be cured. Dorothy admired Mailer’s best-selling The Naked and the Dead. When he sought her out upon his arrival in Los Angeles that summer, she had found the young war novelist and his pregnant wife, Beatrice, to be amusing company. Mailer, exhibitionist as only an insecure, twenty-six-year-old first novelist can be, seemed pathetically eager to be liked. Not so with Karl, whom Dorothy and Ross agreed had a shifty look. She doubted that a confrontation would be a good idea. Mailer said she overestimated the danger and assured her that Karl would behave himself.
When Dorothy and Ross drove up to Mailer’s house, Flic must have caught a whiff of Karl because he seemed reluctant to leave the car. When they finally persuaded him to enter the living room, he immediately urinated on the carpet. Everyone could hear Karl breathing noisily in another part of the house. Dorothy, nervous, got ready to bolt, but Mailer swore he could control the situation.
At last Karl was led out on a leash. Advancing pleasantly, he first eyeballed Flic and sniffed his nose. Then he exploded like a bursting watermelon, his fleshy pink jaws spraying streams of spittle. As Mailer wrestled Karl back to a bedroom, Ross tried to quiet the petrified Flic and got his finger bitten.
As they were getting ready to drive off, Dorothy watched Mailer come scampering after them, shouting and waving his arms. Although outraged, she forced herself to speak. “I said it wouldn’t work,” she told him. Mailer said that he was sorry, but he did not look contrite. It would be nine years before she saw him again, and then she would remember only the harrowing encounter with his dog. In her eyes there was nothing he could do to redeem himself.
During the summer Dorothy was forced to cut back her drinking. Ruth Goetz, in Hollywood with Gus to write a film adaptation of their successful Broadway play The Heiress, remembers Dorothy’s entrance to a party at their house. She fell flat on her face in the hall and had to be scraped up and carried out feet first. In poor health, she suffered from back pains that sapped her strength and caused her to hobble around “bent and bitter.” Admitted to the hospital for tests and X-rays, she was treated by a doctor who lectured her about excessive drinking. “One of her doctors,” Ross Evans reported to Margo Jones, “said he didn’t like her kidneys and she later confessed that she didn’t like his nose.”
Bit by bit Dorothy resigned herself to the fact that The Coast of Illyria would go to neither Broadway nor Edinburgh, although it was a bitter truth to accept. In due course, this failure affected her relations with Ross, who turned moody and talked about wanting peace and quiet. She felt that if their life were much quieter they would be in a coma.
Evans suggested they leave Hollywood. Fearful of electricity in general and electrical appliances in particular, he proposed they relocate in a country where neither was highly regarded, nor continuously available. In Mexico, he promised Dorothy, they would be able to write creatively and live cheaply. He began to promote a town south of Mexico City, Cuernavaca, which had a semitropical climate year-round, sounded suitably exotic, and enjoyed popularity with American tourists. Before many weeks had passed, Ross’s imagination had transformed Cuernavaca into the promised land. When his nagging could be ignored no longer, Dorothy condescended to spending a month’s vacation in Mexico.
In March 1950, they rolled south in Evans’s dusty De Soto, with the sleeping boxer sprawled across the backseat. The trip was notable for its unfriendliness. Dorothy clothed herself in her grand-duchess disguise, and Evans did an outstanding imitation of Abner Yokum. When they arrived at the plaza in Cuernavaca, Dorothy climbed out of the car and gazed around sourly.
They rented a house on the outskirts of town for three hundred pesos a month, a bargain that Dorothy scarcely appreciated. Nor did she find the local culture as entrancing as Ross did. There was a melancholy cathedral, a single movie theater showing endless Cantinflas films, and several dinky outdoor cafés whose tables were monopolized by Americans wearing unattractive beards. She ran into a few Hollywood acquaintances who were staying at the hotels. She also looked up Martha Gellhorn, who, now divorced from Hemingway, was living there with her adopted son.
Certain activities taking place in Cuernavaca that spring would have interested Dorothy a great deal had she known of them at the time. One of the residents there was busily keeping tabs on her for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, though spotty investigation turned up very little of import. The informer was able to find out, for example, the amount of rent Dorothy paid for the house but not Ross Evans’s name. The report refers to him only as “an American writer of the male sex.” According to this document, which was added to her ever-growing file, “In Cuernavaca she is not known to have placed herself in contact with Mexican Communists but according to xxxxxxxxxxxx [name deleted by FBI] PARKER is in contact with various Spanish refugees who reside in Cuernavaca; however, PARKER does not speak Spanish and it is not believed that these contacts are very intensive.”
Dorothy found living in Cuernavaca stupendously monotonous. To make matters worse, after five or six weeks had gone by, she noticed Ross paying excessive attention to a woman who owned a dress shop in town. Jealous, eager for a bit of drama, she protested angrily, but he said nothing. When she threatened to leave, he answered that she could go that very day if she liked.
At the airport in Mexico City, a surly Ross stopped at the terminal entrance just long enough for Dorothy to scramble out before he gunned the De Soto’s motor and pointed it back toward Cuernavaca. He said later, “This so-called Land of Enchantment hardly amused Milady.” Too angry to ask where she was going, he assumed she was returning to “the land of milk and soundtracks,” but Dorothy purchased a ticket to New York.
Arriving at the Plaza Hotel with her belongings stuffed into two large straw bags, she was dressed in a dirndl skirt and a scruffy peasant blouse and looked like a migrant lettuce picker. Her request for a suite ignored the fact that such accommodations cost fifty-five dollars a day and she was carrying barely enough cash on her person to pay the taxi driver. Desperate to get her bearings, she could think of no more ideal surroundings in which to burn Ross Evans in effigy than the most expensive hotel in New York. Soon, she got hold of herself and began telephoning to gather together her friends, the tone of her voice promising electrifying stories of adventures south of the border.
When Bea Stewart arrived, Dorothy gave her a tour of the suite before putting on a woebegone face and launching into a recital of her afflictions: Li’l Abner was a totally inept writer who had never published a story; she had got him a byline in Cosmopolitan; his closest contact with movies had been Radio City Music Hall; she had got him a Hollywood screen credit, VIP treatment in Dallas, and his name in Time magazine. She had even given him the portrait of Scott Fitzgerald she had purchased from Zelda in 1934. She had not expected gratitude. On the other hand, she did not expect him to desert her for another woman, throw her out of her house, force her to flee the country, and—if all that were not horrible enough—he had stolen her dog too. From now on, she vowed, she planned to live by herself.
Three months later, she married Alan again in a splendid ceremony in Bel Air, California, after waking on the morning of August 17, 1950, pulling the blanket over her face, and warning him not to look at the bride. It was bad luck.
She behaved as if the surprise reconciliation had been foreordained and regarded it as a second chance. “Who in life gets a second chance?” she asked. Eager to have fun again, perhaps to be spoiled by a nice-looking man, she was willing to forget ten years riddled by conflict. Alan, oddly enough, was the one who felt uncertain about remarriage. He queried friends, “Do you think she needs me?” A woman he had been dating expressed herself bluntly and asked him, “How can you marry that old woman?” The question was beside the point; at forty-six, Alan had long ceased to consider the age difference. Announcing the news to the press, he said that he had asked Dottie to remarry him, because this was how it was done where he came from, and she had said yes. “You never know why one does these things,” he added lamely. They had no plans for a honeymoon because, Dorothy said, “we’ve been everywhere.”
Alan took charge of the wedding arrangements. He leased and hastily furnished a big house, booked a judge, and ordered a bridal bouquet. Charlie Brackett served as best man and Dorothy, in a nonethnic taffeta cocktail dress, was attended by Sally Foster and Miriam Hopkins. The reception at the Brackett home was memorable for lavish food and drink and the diversity of the guests, who included Humphrey Bogart, Howard and Lucinda Dietz, and James Agee. When somebody pointed out that a few of the guests had not spoken to each other for years, Dorothy agreed that was true. “Including the bride and groom,” she murmured. Budd Schulberg described the party as “a real Hollywood wedding. Dottie had a little bouquet of violets and was busy playing the bride. She went around saying, ‘What are you going to do when you love the son of a bitch?’ She was a riot and yet nobody could doubt she was absolutely serious.” Alan was heard to remark brightly that “now we can have dinner parties again.” As the evening wore on, reported Howard Dietz, “parlor games erupted and raged for hours. All the guests who could still walk played, until Dottie got mad at Alan for guessing she was the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus when she was acting out the Brooklyn Bridge.”
For Alan, the three years since the divorce had often been a struggle, but he was not a person who permitted himself to suffer visibly. For a time he had shared his Manhattan duplex with Tom Heggen, the writer whose comic war novel, Mister Roberts, had been transformed by Josh Logan into a successful Broadway play. In 1949, while Alan was in Hollywood, a maid found Heggen in the bathtub, dead of an overdose of sleeping pills. Alan, aware of Heggen’s severe depression, refused to admit that he might have deliberately killed himself and instead insisted that Tom must have dozed off in the tub. He soon gave up the duplex and moved to California, where he found it increasingly hard to command either the assignments or the money he had received as Dorothy’s partner. A Fox executive urged him to reconcile with his ex-wife, then he would hire them as a team. This did happen after the wedding. In November, they were employed for three weeks.
In the winter of 1951, he and Dorothy tried to pick up their marriage where they had abandoned it in 1942. They had dinner parties. Dorothy bought a new silver-colored poodle whom she named Misty for the dog she’d owned during the war, and she also allowed Alan to institute a regime aimed at improving her health and appearance. In January, he reported to the Murphys that Dorothy looked and felt terrific after getting a new short haircut and a permanent wave. She now had “a beautiful figure, and feels fine besides,” but this impression was misleading. Their second attempt at matrimony was not proving a success. By this time, Alan must have been getting nervous.
In mid-April, two men rang the doorbell. Before they could identify themselves as FBI agents, Dorothy knew they meant trouble—because they were wearing hats, she explained afterward. They began by inquiring if she knew Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, then went on to mention other names: Donald Stewart, Ella Winter, and John Howard Lawson. Was she aware that these individuals were Communists? they asked. Had she ever attended a C.P. meeting with them?
This quiz was merely a prelude. Next came endless questions, quotations from their portable collection of newspaper clippings, references to organizations, rallies, and banquets so unimportant that she could no longer recollect them. Throughout the interrogation, Misty kept barking and jumping on the men, so that Dorothy was frequently obliged to chastise her, although not in a very firm tone because she was probably getting vicarious pleasure from the dog’s refusal to behave. The agents seemed to be curious about Dorothy’s feelings. They repeatedly asked how she felt about this or that group. “Frankly,” she finally said, “I was going through change of life then. How would you have felt?”
On some points she replied emphatically. When asked if she had ever conspired to overthrow the government of the United States, she assured them, “Listen, I can’t even get my dog to stay down. Do I look to you like someone who could overthrow the government?”
She impressed them, they wrote afterward, as “a very nervous type of person” who weighed approximately 125 pounds and dressed neatly. “During the course of this interview, she denied ever having been affiliated with, having donated to, or being contacted by a representative of the C.P.” Their report was soon joined by another exhibit, a form letter mailed out over her signature on behalf of the Spanish Refugee League, which Walter Winchell’s office had forwarded to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover with a note:
Dear Mr. Hoover:
Mr. Winchell wondered if you knew about Dorothy Parker, the poet and wit, who led many pro-Russian groups. She and the boss were once good friends, but she became a mad fanatic of the Commy party line.
The decade-long shadow cast over the country’s history by McCarthy-ism poisoned Dorothy’s personal and professional life and eventually undermined her spirit. She could think of no better term to describe the horror of the anti-Communist inquisition than Dalton Trumbo’s derisive phrase “the time of the toad,” when stool pigeons played the informer to save themselves. Many friends of hers were blacklisted, denounced as traitors, subpoenaed, cited for contempt of Congress, and sentenced to prison terms. Among those close to her, Lillian Hellman managed to foil the House Un-American Activities Committee by refusing to betray friends and still escaping the consequences. Less fortunate were Dashiell Hammett and Ring Lardner, Jr., who ended by serving prison terms. Donald Stewart and Ella Winter avoided subpoenas by moving to England. Practically all of Dorothy’s friends on the board of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, whose national chairman she had been, went to jail after declining to turn over records to HUAC.
Dorothy’s deliberately provocative behavior seemed calculated to attract HUAC’s attention. At first, perhaps underestimating the dangers involved, she adopted defiance as the only sane response. In 1947, speaking at a rally to raise money for the defense of Hans Eisler (brother of C.P. leader Gerhart Eisler), she unabashedly informed the audience that she was there to “damn the souls” of the Committee and its chairman, Representative J. Parnell Thomas. The next day she read her remarks in the New York Daily News, along with the information that HUAC planned to subpoena her. The Committee failed to carry out its threat, and no United States deputy marshal arrived at the New Weston bearing a bright pink slip. In September of that year, when Thomas began subpoenaing people in the film industry, she journeyed to Washington in order to attend the hearings in person and did not hesitate to voice her disgust. In New York, she delivered a scorching speech at a fund-raising reception for the nineteen Hollywood directors, actors, and writers who refused to cooperate with the Committee, where she shouted, “For Heaven’s sake, children, Fascism isn’t coming—it’s here. It’s dreadful. Stop it!” Still she was not called to testify, even though she continued to characterize the Committee as a bunch of fools and to denounce the FBI as an agency that she held in “monumental scorn.”
Beginning in 1949, her name came up regularly as a subversive. In that year, not only was she branded a “Red appeaser” by the California State Senate Committee on Un-American Activities, but at the espionage trial of Judith Coplon, accused of stealing government secrets to aid Russia, an FBI document naming Dorothy and Edward G. Robinson as traitors was read aloud. The accusation made her feel “very sick” because she was glad to be an American, she said. She was acquainted with no Russians—but wished she was—and had no plans to sell them secrets, for the simple reason that she knew none. Robinson denied he had ever been a Party member. No denial was issued by Dorothy, who insisted that she did not “even understand what a Communist organization is.”
By 1950, the year Senator Joseph McCarthy made his first charges, the FBI had categorized Dorothy as one of four hundred concealed Communists, which they defined as a person “who does not hold himself out as a Communist and who would deny membership in the Party.” The Bureau also quoted an informant as stating that Dorothy had once been considered “queen of the Communists” by her neighbors in Bucks County. The same informant reported that, although Dorothy publicly disparaged HUAC, privately she was more worried than she let on. She had been heard to declare that if the Committee questioned her about the C.P., she would refuse to answer, and she also boasted of having friends in the Justice Department who had offered to get her files removed if the need ever arose. In 1950, she found herself listed in the pamphlet Red Channels, a right-wing compilation of “Communist sympathizers” that the broadcasting and advertising industries adopted as a guide to employment and blacklisting. To be included in Red Channels could be dismissed as a gigantic joke, even as a strange kind of compliment because it also listed liberals like Leonard Bernstein and Marc Connelly. The following year, screenwriter Martin Berkeley singled her out as a top Hollywood Communist. “I was blacklisted,” Dorothy admitted later. While she had never actually been dismissed from a job, she knew that “I couldn’t get another” had she sought employment.
In 1953, Dorothy read in The New York Times that Senator McCarthy planned to call her as a witness in connection with his investigation of subversive literature in the State Department’s overseas libraries. This proved another false alarm—no subpoena arrived. Should she ever be called, she had decided on the course she would follow. Choices were limited to three: invoke the First Amendment and risk going to prison, take the Fifth and risk blacklisting and possibly imprisonment, or cooperate with the Committee by turning informer. Her choice was to take the Fifth. She agreed with E. M. Forster, who had written that if he were forced to choose between betraying a friend and betraying his country, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country.
She was finally invited to mount a witness stand in 1955, and then it was strictly a local show, a New York State legislative committee investigating the alleged diversion of millions in charitable contributions to the Communist Party. Dorothy was called because one of the committee’s targets was the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, listed by the U.S. Attorney General as a Communist front. She arrived at the county court house looking smart in a mink jacket over a brown suit, a large Tyrolean-style hat, and a regal smile. Unlike other witnesses who began angrily denouncing the state senators, she controlled her temper. It was true, she told them, that she had made speeches and signed countless letters appealing for funds when she had been national chairman, but she had not composed the letters. As for what had become of the $1.5 million collected to aid refugees from Franco, she had no idea. She knew nothing about the JAFRC’s finances except that the money was used “to help people who were helpless.” Nor did she know if the group was controlled by the C.P.—it had never occurred to her to ask, she said. Dorothy was uniformly polite to all queries except one. Asked if she had ever been a member of the Party, she ferociously invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer on the grounds of possible self-incrimination.
Shortly after she took the Fifth, the FBI closed its investigation of her. A four-page memorandum, dated April 15, 1955, and reviewing her C.P. activity since 1950, concluded with the following recommendation: “Although the foregoing information reflects CP front activity in the past three years, and the subject could technically qualify for inclusion in the Security Index, it is not felt that she is dangerous enough to warrant her inclusion in same.”
The summer of 1951, with the Korean War entering its second year, was particularly frightening. In July, Dashiell Hammett was arrested after declining to reveal the names of contributors to a bail fund operated by the Civil Rights Congress, a group largely devoted to supporting the civil rights of Party members. The specter of doom had edged much closer to home than Hammett’s trouble, however. In March, a man known to be a Communist Party leader was appearing before HUAC when one of the Committee members suddenly brought up the name of Alan Campbell.
MR. TAVENNER. Allen [sic] Campbell was secretary of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Have you talked to him about the affairs of the league?
MR. JEROME. I decline to answer the question in the exercise of my right against discrimination.
Representative Frank Tavenner dropped Alan and went on to other individuals, but even that brief mention seemed ominous to Alan. He was shocked. In the thirties, he had gone along with Dorothy’s politics simply because he was her husband, but he had rejected the Party long ago. He was terrified that he would be blacklisted and thus unable to work; indeed he must have already attributed part of his difficulty in getting a job to Dorothy’s politics. Alan was not the only one to feel panic. As Sid Perelman noted, the mood in Hollywood had passed beyond simple anxiety and now rapidly approached frenzy. Many he knew worried about being interned by the FBI—“and people are being so jugged and blacklisted.” He described the film capital as a terrible combination of a boom town gone bust and Nazi Germany in 1935. Dorothy likened the widespread fear to “the smell of a Black Plague.”
During that summer, Dorothy and Alan planned no dinner parties. After a violent quarrel, Alan walked out and their marriage ended as abruptly as it had resumed. His parting comment, Dorothy later claimed, was to hand her a twenty-dollar bill and tell her not to worry because the rent was paid for a year. Unfortunately, he neglected to mention the furniture. Not long after he left, a store van drove up and movers began to strip the house systematically to the bare walls, although Dorothy was able to rescue her bed.
More disgusted than bitter, she washed her hands of Alan for a second time, swearing that this time the marriage was dead. For several weeks, she managed on her own. At the end of the summer, despite the barren rooms, she acquired two roommates, Jim Agee and his friend Pat Scallon, a pretty, fresh-complected twenty-two-year-old whom Dorothy privately christened the Pink Worm. Agee, forty-one, former film critic for Time, and now a highly regarded screenwriter, was enveloped in a full-blown obsession with the young woman, even though he had a family in New York. Like Dorothy, Agee was an alcoholic, but his physical condition was far worse. Earlier that year he had suffered a coronary while working on The African Queen. He was supposed to ease up on liquor and cigarettes, and to eat salads, fruit, and fish, the latter items seldom found in Dorothy’s pantry. Agee smoked and drank as usual and showed no sign of being able to change his regimen. Dorothy told Sid Perelman that one Friday evening he had consumed three bottles of Scotch unaided, which led Perelman to speculate about the quantity she had consumed. Agee looked like a panhandler. Day after day he wore the same filthy, sweaty shirt and pants, the same scuffed black shoes. He badly required a barber, a dentist, and a bath. Other writers at Fox complained about having to eat lunch near him in the commissary.
Dorothy, who got on well with him, welcomed his company. She was unperturbed about his disregard for personal hygiene, having more than once found herself in a like frame of mind. For that matter, anyone who valued domestic cleanliness would not have remained long in her house. The condition of the place grew increasingly squalid as the weeks went on because arranging for maid or laundry service did not occur to her. She liked having Agee around, especially after one convivial evening when she walked into a tree in the yard, causing her to fall insensible to the ground. She figured that she might have been lying there until morning if Agee had not come along and dragged her inside.
Her ménage à trois with Agee and the Pink Worm caused the squeamish to blanch. A disgusted Sid Perelman described them as living like pigs “in a fog of crapulous laundry, stale cigarette smoke, and dirty dishes, sans furniture or cleanliness; one suspects they wet their beds.” The group broke up at the end of October when Agee was stricken with a second heart attack. Once he had been released from the hospital, his wife, Mia, arrived to take charge of him. Dorothy, alone and lonely in the empty rooms, her toleration for disorder apparently having reached its limit, moved herself and Misty to a tidy room at the Chateau Marmont.
By September 1952, she was back in New York and feeling so grateful to be home that “I get up every morning and want to kiss the pavement.” She leased an apartment in a residence hotel on East Seventy-fourth Street, just off Central Park. The Volney was a small, well-kept, moderately expensive hotel popular with the literary and theater crowd. Dorothy knew a number of people who had once lived there, including journalist Quentin Reynolds, who still did. It was idyllic for Misty, since there were more than forty dogs in the building. All she wanted to do now was to write a successful play and be able to “eat and live and have a roof—and buy some dresses.” Soon after her arrival she wasted no time in beginning a play featuring characters who live in a hotel that closely resembles the Volney.
In California, while working on a picture about Eva Tanguay called The I Don’t Care Girl, she had met Arnaud d‘Usseau. At thirty-six, d’Usseau was a successful playwright who had a fine record as a co-writer on the Broadway stage. During the war, collaborating with James Gow, he had taken part in several commercial hits including Tomorrow the World and Deep Are the Roots. In 1951, after Gow died, d’Usseau tried to write a play alone but was never able to get it produced. Like Dorothy, he did best as a team writer. When they met, it was a case of two professionals in search of a collaborator. Dorothy also felt personally attracted to the hard-working, moody, bespectacled writer, a well-known radical whose views were compatible with her own.
Their original idea, a murder mystery, was soon discarded. “We dropped it when we found we liked the murderers too much,” Dorothy joked. Instead, they began talking about a social phenomenon particularly noticeable in New York but certainly not exclusive to it. “We had been thinking of the numbers of small expensive hotels, lived in by lone ladies. And there we were.” Like the Volney, these apartment hotels were located in the side streets of the Upper East Side, streets so desirable that they actually had trees planted on them. Exclusive and expensive, they proudly advertised their addresses by claiming that everything interesting in Manhattan lay within convenient distance, a ridiculous boast in Dorothy’s opinion because she doubted very much that the women who lived in these hotels ever went anywhere interesting. Mostly they were widows who, in Dorothy’s words, “are not young. But they take excellent care of themselves, and may look forward to twenty good years, which will be spent ... doing what they are doing in the present, which is nothing at all.”
Admittedly these idle, elderly, lavender-coiffed widows sounded dreary. How many people would want to watch three acts about their barren lives? But what if a woman younger than the rest should happen to be washed ashore, someone who is aware of time slipping by and who looks around and sees in her sister guests some unhappy prophecies of her own future, someone like herself? It was interesting to imagine the complications that such a catalyst might provoke.
There is no question that Dorothy liked the Volney, despite her fierce criticism of it during the next fifteen years. It was exactly to her taste, the kind of surroundings that felt as familiar as a mother’s womb. A green canopied entrance led to a dark, oak-paneled lounge where residents congregated for free tea, gossip, and sour examinations of visitors. Behind the front desk, a switchboard operator smoked and read movie magazines. At the end of the lobby was a dining room where a round table displaying fruit and pastries that seemed to be made of wax sat in the doorway. Dorothy, who always used room service for meals, seldom ate there. She paid $275 (a hefty price in 1952) for a two-room apartment that included a good-sized living room, bedroom, and pantry with a small refrigerator and a hot plate. There were other advantages as well. The management offered maid and laundry service and doormen to walk dogs and assist tipsy residents out of cabs. Once a year, the hotel redecorated and replaced the furniture and rugs that Misty had urinated upon or chewed up.
Not only did she find the Volney comfortable, but also she derived perverse pleasure from its aging clientele, who provided a butt for her ghoulish humor. It seemed as if everywhere she looked her eyes fell upon dried-up females who appeared on the brink of death. She began to wonder how the hotel would get her out should she happen to die. Obviously not by the tiny passenger elevator, which could not accommodate a coffin unless it was stood on end, an undignified position in her opinion, and she certainly would not wish to be carted away in the service elevator with the trash. Finally she came up with a solution that she confided to Quentin Reynolds, who was living on the sixth floor. They must persuade the Volney to build a chute leading from one of its upper floors to the Frank Campbell Funeral Home, a well-known mortuary located a few blocks away. “We’d arrive in good condition and the trip would take a minute,” Dorothy said.
Dorothy and Arnaud d‘Usseau spent the fall at the Volney writing The Ladies of the Corridor, whose title came from T. S. Eliot’s “Sweeney Erect.” To avoid problems, d’Usseau’s wife, Susan, established strict rules for dealing with Dorothy’s drinking. The d’Usseaus began to function as a package replacement for Alan, with Arnaud as writing partner and Susan assuming responsibility for maintenance of sobriety and management of daily affairs.
Susan was a textile designer and portrait painter. Some years before, she had operated the Book of the Day shop in Hollywood, a bookstore and art gallery that the House Un-American Activities Committee described as a Communist Party front business. Not a great beauty in her physical features, she was vivacious and good humored, an exceptional cook and hostess who knew how to make guests feel comfortable. She was fifteen years older than her husband, whom she married when he was in his early twenties. As a friend described the couple, “She educated him to be a cosmopolitan who knew what to order in restaurants and what wine went with what. Before that he had been a little boy wet behind the ears.” When Arnaud presented his new collaborator, Susan promptly took Dorothy in hand and decided she must be kept off the bottle. Using a system of rewards and bribes, she decreed there would be no drinking during working hours. After work, Arnaud brought Dorothy and Misty back to the house the d’Usseaus owned on East Fifty-eighth Street, where Susan had a home-cooked meal waiting. She fixed Dorothy a drink, allotting time enough for only one before serving the meal at the unusually early hour of six-thirty. After dinner there was entertainment in the form of guests, who had been invited to spend the evening playing charades, adverbs, Botticelli, all the parlor games that Dorothy adored. Susan, in the meantime, unobtrusively monitored Dorothy’s liquor intake so that she would be pleasantly high but not so drunk that she could not work the next day.
Through the d’Usseaus, Dorothy met actor-painter Zero Mostel and his wife, Kate, both of whom she liked immediately and henceforth counted among her closest friends. Zero disliked games, but found that playing with Dorothy was amusing enough to make an exception. One night they were playing Botticelli, the game of identities in which a player thinks of a famous person, Hamlet for example, and tells the other players the initial. They have to ask questions like “Did you write music to be played on water?” and the player who is “it” has to reply, “No, I’m not Handel.” When it was Dorothy’s turn to ask a question, she said, “Do you chase men for business and pleasure?”—a question that stumped the it-player so thoroughly that he had to give up. “J. Edgar Hoover,” Dorothy said. Her answer found an appreciative audience in Mostel who suffered from blacklisting and the grilling of congressional committees. An adoring Kate Mostel thought of Dorothy as “a little flower who wasn’t like the rest of us. She was a fragile, ladylike lady who had to be protected. Somebody would always do her taxes, always escort her home in a taxi, always pick up the tab in a restaurant.”
Dorothy found it vulgar for a woman even to acknowledge the presence of a check on a restaurant table. When invited to friends’ homes, she was content to do nothing after dinner but smoke in the parlor while waiting for after-dinner drinks to be served. Whenever she visited the Mostels, she trotted around the table before dinner and folded up the napkins into animal shapes and afterward offered to help Kate clean up. She took a single plate and polished it until Kate removed it from her hands. The Mostels, aware of her reputation for lethality, waited to be bit but found her toothless.
Kate and Zero Mostel spoiled her. Zero’s brother Milton became her accountant, a hair-raising task because she kept no records and all checks were made out to liquor stores or cash. Susan d’Usseau ran errands and bought her clothes, even underwear. As a result, Dorothy was looking uncharacteristically fashionable. One reason for the rather odd clothing she normally wore was that she disliked shopping, but a more serious problem was her figure, which had begun to develop a notable alcoholic tire around the middle and made her feel self-conscious. To Norman Mailer, her clothing looked as if it had come from attics, except that Los Angeles was a city without attics, and so he never could figure out where she acquired her “congeries of black shawls and garments that gave her the appearance of a British witch.” The loose, baggy garments did little for her appearance, but they were comfortable.
Susan d‘Usseau was, Dorothy discovered, a rigid taskmaster, but more often than not she succeeded in keeping her sober. Dorothy did not mind being bossed around, at least not during the week, because she enjoyed Susan’s personal services—and she did not even have to be married to get them. She showed her appreciation by thanking her profusely and sending her a case of champagne one New Year’s. Weekends and holidays were mercifully exempt from the regimen. On Thanksgiving Day, invited to the Mostels for dinner, she showed up late with the excuse that she had seen a lost kitten huddled under a car. “That was really the drunkest I ever saw her,” said Kate Mostel. “She had a crying jag and all evening talked about the kitten who had no home.” The other guests decided she must have an exceptional passion for cats. Another evening at the Mostels, writer Ian Hunter threatened to kill his family cat. Angry because the animal had urinated in his favorite chair again, he asked for suggestions on the best way to dispose of it. “I expected Dottie to get hysterical,” Kate Mostel said. “Instead she said to Ian, ‘Have you tried kindness?’ ”
By the time The Ladies of the Corridor was completed at the end of the year, Dorothy had begun thinking of it as a feminist play that warned women “to stop sitting around and saying ‘It’s a man’s world.’ ” Although the wasted lives of her characters disturbed her, she was inclined to believe that their illness was rooted not so much in age as in manlessness “and they should be better trained, adjusted to live a life without a man,” a problem that she herself had yet to resolve. It is difficult to determine d’Usseau’s contribution to the story since this was a drama about being Dorothy Parker at fifty-nine, living in a hotel without a man, feeling terrified, and wondering what “fresh hell” lay in wait for her. All the characters seemed to be taken from her life: Eleanor Rothschild, Alan, Horte, but mostly various aspects of herself as an alcoholic, would-be suicide, middle-aged woman seeking affection from a younger man, and as the crone she feared becoming.
Producer Walter Fried planned a first-class production for the following fall. Harold Clurman staged it with an all-star cast. In the leading roles were Edna Best, Betty Field, and Shepperd Strudwick, and an excellent supporting cast included Frances Starr, June Walker, Vera Allen, Margaret Barker, and Walter Matthau. These were exciting months for Dorothy who attended all the rehearsals. Walter Matthau remembered her as “very quiet and quite shy.”
Harold Clurman found her presence unpleasant. “The first day of rehearsal, when we actually put the play on the stage and it was working out very nicely, she began to cry because there it was coming to life.” He labeled her “a bleeding-heart” liberal who was “seldom far from hysteria.” They clashed because she refused to give him credit for knowing anything about audiences. He assured her the play would be a hit if she agreed to cut the Betty Field—character’s suicide and give the work a happy ending. Dorothy wouldn’t hear of it. Making the alcoholic character suffer pleased her, and furthermore, she despised happy endings.
The Ladies of the Corridor had its premiere on October 21, 1953. Dorothy thought it would be “insane” to attend the opening, but, of course, she did. The minute the curtain lowered she crept out and accompanied the d‘Usseaus and the Mostels to the home of friends for a celebration and to wait for the reviews, “and then some bastard said, ‘Let’s go out and get the papers.’ ” Some of the reviews turned out to be disappointing, “not rotten, but not good,” remembered Kate Mostel, who played a small part as a chambermaid. They all did their best to comfort Dorothy, calling critic Brooks Atkinson a jerk who couldn’t distinguish “shit from Shinola,” but the negative comments hurt because, she said, “that play was the only thing I have ever done in which I had great pride.” As she was pulling on her coat to leave, she whispered, “Does anybody need a lady pool shark?”
The Ladies of the Corridor turned out to be a near-miss. Even though The New York Times critic thought everyone knew old women lead pathetic lives without having to go to the theater for a reminder, still five of the eight New York reviewers admired the play. It especially impressed George Jean Nathan, who voted it the best American play of the season in the Drama Critics Circle balloting. It was, he thought, “completely honest.” It also closed after six weeks.
Almost immediately, Dorothy and d’Usseau began work on a second play. The protagonist of The Ice Age, Gordon Corey, is a passive man of twenty-five, extremely good-looking, always tanned, married, strapped for money, and living with his mother. Even after twenty-five years, Dorothy’s hatred of Horte Campbell remained intense, because she included dialogue that characterized Gordon Corey’s mother as evil and stupid. After finding a job at an art museum, he is seduced by its owner, Adrian Zabel, a wealthy and cultivated homosexual of almost satanic dimensions who regards him as a perfect sex object. When Daisy Corey, Gordon’s wife, accuses her husband of sleeping with his employer, he shouts hysterically that he no longer feels sexual desire for her and cannot even bear to touch her. Once the homosexual affair has driven away Daisy and their newborn child, and Adrian is planning to add Gordon to his permanent collection, Gordon bashes in his head with a piece of marble sculpture as the curtain falls.
In the fall of 1955, producer Robert Whitehead agreed to take an option on The Ice Age and advanced the authors fifteen hundred dollars. When the good news was reported to Dorothy, she rejoiced at getting a deal that seemed “very pretty and I love it.” What she did not suspect was that Whitehead cared little for the play and did not intend to produce it. He was, however, fond of Dorothy:
The subject of homosexuality wasn’t unusual in the fifties, and by then I was getting kind of bored reading plays about people whose mothers and fathers had made them fags. It was a bad play, and I didn’t want to do it, but I must have decided, “Oh Christ, I’ll option it because of Dottie and then let the option drop.”
That was precisely what happened. The Ice Age failed to enthuse Dorothy’s New York agent, Leah Salisbury, because it sounded more like a political tract than a play. She dutifully tried to interest Emlyn Williams in playing the museum director, but when these negotiations failed and the Whitehead option was dropped, she made no further effort to arrange a production. By that time, Dorothy herself had grown disenchanted and was willing to let it die a natural death.
The Ice Age concluded her professional collaboration with d‘Usseau as well as her intimacy with him and his wife. During the McCarthy period, the couple’s lives had grown increasingly rocky. Arnaud d’Usseau had been described as a member of the Hollywood Communist Party by Martin Berkeley and others. Summoned before HUAC in 1953, he declined to discuss his political affiliations, past or present, on the basis of the Fifth Amendment and spent most of his time on the witness stand energetically engaging the congressmen in debates about anti-Semitism and racial discrimination. Susan d‘Usseau, unlike her husband, was closemouthed, and her time on the stand was accordingly brief. She took the Fifth and First amendments whenever queried about Party membership and refused to answer almost every question put to her. While neither of the d’Usseaus cooperated with the Committee, neither was cited for contempt. Their marriage broke up.
Although Dorothy had needed the d‘Usseaus, she resented assistance and hated the obligations that such dependency always entailed. In the end, she retaliated by writing a story about characters who loosely resembled the d’Usseaus in some respects. She portrayed the woman as the epitome of an abandoned wife who whines so bitterly and incessantly that nobody can stand to be around her, and the husband as a man who walks out on a marriage considered ideal because, his wife decides later, he was going through male menopause. Her picture of the wife was especially heartless.
Dorothy had difficulty feeling appreciative for the temporary sobriety the d’Usseaus imposed on her—even if it made possible two playscripts.