Chapter 17
1955-1960
Dorothy’s dream of Broadway fame may have been thwarted, but it brought her back to New York, forced her to plan a life without Alan, and paved the way for her return to writing fiction. For the first time since 1941, her byline appeared in The New Yorker.
While working on The Ice Age, where homosexuality had been a central motif and she had revealed a predictable lack of sensitivity in her treatment of certain types of homosexuals, she was also writing “I Live on Your Visits,” which was published in The New Yorker in January 1955. Once again her preoccupation with homosexuality overflowed into her work. Inspired by observation of a friend’s relations with her sons, the story was primarily about the sterile life of an alcoholic divorcee who lives vicariously on the visits of an adolescent son now making his home with his father and stepmother. Dorothy must have been privately appalled, because she was pitiless in exposing her friend as a drunken mother who inflicts untold damage on her child. For comic relief, however, Dorothy could not resist adding a peripheral character who drifts in and out of the story, a character whom editor William Maxwell described as “a chatterbox homosexual queen, well along in years and terribly amusing, a perfectly standard character that everybody would now recognize. My superiors stuck at the idea of writing about such a person.” He was instructed to inform Dorothy that the magazine would not publish the story unless the homosexual was removed. “She agreed to this, reluctantly, and probably only because she was in need of money,” said Maxwell. She certainly needed money, but her greater need was to publish fiction again. The story as printed suffers from monotonous repetition in showing the mother’s unconscious cruelty. While it did not require a homosexual character, it needed a counterpoint to dilute the intensity of Dorothy’s painful portrait of the mother and son. Her instinct was essentially correct.
The New Yorker published two additional stories. “Lolita” (1955) concerns the necessity for escaping from the type of possessive, manipulating mother whom Dorothy had written about in her two recent plays and in “I Live on Your Visits.” In this case, she made the child a daughter, a plain, thoroughly undistinguished young woman who extricates herself from her mother by marrying a man who is successful, handsome, and very much in love with her. Lolita’s mother, having happily concluded that her duckling daughter will never attract a man, is bewildered and jealous. Her only comfort is the hope that someday John Marble will leave Lolita, and she will be forced to return home.
In “Lolita,” for the first time, Dorothy departed from her usual technique by writing entirely in narrative. Her previous fiction had always relied heavily on telling a story through what people said to each other, her ear for recreating such conversations being uncanny. “I haven’t got a visual mind. I hear things.” In 1955, she vowed, “I’m not going to do those he-said she-said things any more, they’re over, honey, they’re over. I want to do the story that only can be told in the narrative form, and though they’re going to scream about the rent, I’m going to do it.” But her experimentation with the all-narrative form was short-lived because in her next story, “The Banquet of Crow,” her scathing picture of a couple like the d’Usseaus, she returned to dialogue.
Throughout the fifties, Dorothy’s relations with The New Yorker underwent a change. She ceased to feel a personal attachment to the magazine after Harold Ross died of cancer in 1951 and was succeeded as editor by William Shawn. Now she regarded the publication as she did any other. In her dealings with William Maxwell, she adopted a manner that he described as “very solicitous and motherly. It was unnerving.” He felt that her current work lacked the sharp vernacular quality that once had distinguished her fiction. “Her style had become heavily mannered and grew more and more like a fictional King James Bible.”
Dorothy’s next—and last—story was written in the stately style that made Maxwell uncomfortable. In “The Bolt Behind the Blue” (1958), an unmarried secretary who is poor and plain finds herself philanthropically befriended by a rich woman. Mary Nicholl is invited to Alicia Hazleton’s home for cocktails, but never for dinners, so that Alicia can show off her house and her glamorous wardrobe. The story is a study in female pretense and self-deception with the secretary swearing after she leaves that she wouldn’t trade places with the rich woman for anything on earth, and Alicia Hazleton declaring she would be delighted to exchange. It was amazing, the narrator observed, that a bolt did not swoop from the sky and strike down both of them. Around this time, Dorothy complained to James Thurber and Edmund Wilson that The New Yorker had been rejecting her stories lately and possibly it is this one she meant. At any rate, it was published instead in Esquire, where she recently had begun writing a monthly column and was establishing a close personal relationship with publisher Arnold Gingrich.
In January 1957, The New York Times asked Dorothy to review Sid Perelman’s latest book, The Road to Miltown, a piece that appeared prominently on the front page of the Book Review. It caught the eye of Harold Hayes, a young editor at Esquire who had long been a fan of hers. “Seeing the review made me wonder why I hadn’t read anything by her lately. So I tracked her down to the Volney and asked her to do something for us.” The assignment was a year-end round-up of notable books. On the strength of that article, the magazine offered her the position of regular book columnist beginning with the April 1958 issue, an honored spot that once had been occupied by writers such as Sinclair Lewis, James T. Farrell, and William Lyon Phelps. While Esquire was less familiar to her than The New Yorker, she had known Arnold Gingrich since the thirties and his wife, Jane, even longer than that, and she immediately felt at home as a contributor. Said Harold Hayes, “She was precious to the magazine, which had been going through a fairly fallow period and was just starting to come alive again. If Esquire was being seen anew, Dorothy Parker was one of the reasons. Whereas she may not have regarded writing the column as a great literary period in her career, her doing it was one of the great things happening to us.”
Esquire gave her the first financial security she had enjoyed since the 1930s. She was paid six hundred dollars a month, with raises until the figure eventually reached seven hundred and fifty, and she could count on a check even when she missed a column. There were times when Harold Hayes found it necessary to issue a delicate reminder that the deadline was approaching or make last-minute trips to the Volney to collect the column. She was charmed by the young North Carolinian who always treated her like a lace doily, understood that “she had a miserable time writing,” and gave her full credit for being, as he said, “one of the major writers in the country, in my mind.” With Hayes she allowed herself to act playful, even a bit flirtatious. One day when he telephoned to compliment her on a column, she trilled happily, “Will you marry me?” Hayes knew that she drank because sometimes on the telephone her articulation was distorted. This distressed him because “she was an elderly lady. But I certainly never considered her a drunk. Occasionally she just would have a little too much to drink—I think the old-fashioned word is tipsy.”
During her five years as Esquire’s book reviewer, Dorothy wrote forty-six columns and reviewed more than two hundred books, a tremendous output for her but a lot less than Arnold Gingrich would have liked. Having lured her to his magazine, he continually badgered her to write more pieces—a retrospective of the Jazz Age or a piece on speakeasies, he suggested—and Dorothy politely agreed these would make splendid subjects. She hooted at his notion that the twenties had been glamorous and proposed a title that she thought was honest: “The Dingy Decade.” But, recalled Gingrich, “it was so hard getting her regular columns out of her with anything reasonably resembling regularity that I never did have much hope of our getting the extra piece.” The only bonus she gave him was her short story, “The Bolt Behind the Blue.”
At first she struggled hard to meet deadlines, but then she could not resist playing games, perhaps unconsciously withholding copy so that she would hear from Hayes or from fiction editor Rust Hills whose name tickled her (she said it conjured up images of New Jersey suburbs), one or the other of whom might rush up to the Volney to pick up her column. More frequently, she was tardy because reading the books became a grinding effort, aside from the fact that she hated writing. The longer she sat at her typewriter, the more paralyzed she became. Gingrich recognized this problem and before long thought of her writer’s block as a complicated case of childbirth. He viewed his own job as obstetrics, and often referred to the monthly operation as a “high-forceps delivery.” Not that forceps always worked, but his success rate at prying copy from her beat all other publishers. There were those who believed that not even a cesarean section could make Dorothy meet a writing deadline.
Aside from Gingrich’s generosity about money, he rose to her defense whenever asked why he had hired a blacklisted writer, although it was unlikely she knew about the mail that attacked Esquire for publishing her. Would he, a reader asked, employ a Nazi storm trooper for an editorial position? Then why was he hiring a Communist? Gingrich replied curtly that he knew nothing of Dorothy’s private life, but judging by her writings for Esquire, if she was a Communist, then the late Senator Robert Taft was a dangerous radical and so was his father.
Arnold Gingrich was not the only person looking out for her welfare. Among those aware of her precarious financial position, nobody was more determined for her to have a decent income than Leah Salisbury, the formidable literary agent who made a point of inventing fresh angles so that Dorothy might profit from the work she had produced during her lifetime. Although she had used topflight movie agents to obtain screen assignments, she never had a literary agent until 1952 because she held them in low esteem. She acquired Salisbury by chance. Her client list included the Perelmans, the Goetzes, the Hacketts, and Arnaud d‘Usseau. When d’Usseau and Dorothy began to collaborate, it seemed logical for Salisbury to represent both of them in negotiations with theatrical producers. After the partnership ended, Salisbury continued to handle Dorothy’s professional affairs.
The sad truth was that after forty years as a writer she owned practically nothing tangible to show for it. All the money earned in Hollywood and from her collected works had vanished. She had been imprudent when it came to investing—she dreaded thinking about the future let alone planning for it—but that did not mean she took responsibility for her present circumstances. In 1958, she was sixty-five, an age when most people look forward to retirement. She felt that everyone expected her to toil until she sunk in her tracks like a creaking plowhorse. Although the prospect was horrible, she could not retire. She had no money.
Dorothy observed happily as Leah Salisbury wheeled and dealed on her behalf. Salisbury did not hesitate to crack down on pirates, amateur or professional, who had long been in the habit of using Dorothy’s work for everything from high school dramatic productions to network television programs. Shutting down unauthorized productions and confiscating scripts and tape recordings, she warned violators that they would be lucky if Dorothy did not bring charges against them. Salisbury told Dorothy that if her material was to be adapted for the stage, it must be a first-class production that would bring her pride and happiness, in addition to the money. Dorothy agreed. Those who requested permission to adapt her stories and verse for the stage or screen were often sped on their ways with regrets that Miss Parker did not feel her material could be a success in the form they presented.
With one hand Salisbury labored to transform old writings into current income, as when she sold René Clair the film rights to “Here We Are” for four thousand dollars, and with the other she urged Dorothy to undertake new projects. As a result, Dorothy signed a contract with Bernard Geis Associates to write a biography of Ethel Barrymore, in collaboration with Barrymore’s son Samuel Colt. As the Geis press release announced, Dorothy’s insights into the distinguished actress would produce a lasting contribution to American letters. Bernard Geis admitted that the book, “never came close to transpiring.” Along with the Barrymore book, he also signed her to write her autobiography, a project that Leah Salisbury had been pressing her to consider. To Salisbury, it must have seemed that a memoir would be a fitting subject, not only in terms of public interest but also a book that Dorothy might be strongly motivated to complete. For all her respect for her client and a tolerance for eccentricities that sometimes verged on the saintly, Salisbury was not sufficiently familiar with Dorothy’s personal history to understand that the subject had been attempted fiction-ally in Sonnets in Suicide and ended in disaster.
Dorothy confided in Quentin Reynolds that “rather than write my life story I would cut my throat with a dull knife.” Like some other authors, she considered publishers to be fair game, but, in this case, she must have felt guilty or sorry for Geis because she decided to return his advance. By the time she reached this decision, however, she had already spent a good deal of it. To show that she meant well, she sent a down payment on her debt. “Dear Bernie,” she wrote,
This is, as you see, only a part of what I owe you for your advance. The book—oh, I can’t. I’ve tried and tried, I’ve gone away alone, I’ve done my damndest. But it doesn’t come—I’m sorry I have to pay you back in bits and pieces—but times are like that with me—Always with gratitude and affection—
Whether she was referring to the Barrymore book or to her own memoir is irrelevant, for she could do neither. In the letter she enclosed a check for a tenth of the advance. Geis felt happy to write off the remaining ninety percent “to experience and to the privilege of being able to say I once almost published a book and a half by Dorothy Parker.”
The following year, Salisbury tried to engineer another contract for Dorothy’s life with editor Lee Schryver at Doubleday, but by then the Parker reputation for ripping off publishing houses had grown, and Doubleday stipulated certain fail-safe conditions. Dorothy dragged her feet in signing a contract in which payments were contingent upon delivering sections of the manuscript. Finally, Doubleday gave up. Random House publisher Bennett Cerf severely criticized her for accepting advances on books that she had no intention of writing. He considered her behavior unprincipled.
Salisbury remained undaunted. When Columbia Pictures approached her with the idea of making a film about Dorothy’s life, she gave serious attention to their proposal. The story editor at Columbia, thinking big bucks, reminded her about the financial success of such movies as The Jolson Story. Salisbury passed along the idea to Dorothy, who was in Martha’s Vineyard visiting Lillian Hellman.
Dear Dorothy—
Would you be interested in discussing a motion picture to be based on your wonderfully interesting life—don’t shoot me, I was asked and said I’d try to find out!
Dorothy did not dignify the letter with a reply.
Lillian Hellman was eager to venture onto the musical stage with an operetta based on Voltaire’s witty novel Candide. She wrote the book, Leonard Bernstein composed the score, and poet Richard Wilbur assumed chief responsibility for the lyrics. Initially, other lyrics were written by James Agee, followed by John Latouche. When he withdrew, Dorothy was invited to step in.
“I had only one lyric in it.... Thank God I wasn’t there while it was going on. There were too many geniuses involved.” The show’s history did turn out to be chaotic. The story line underwent constant revisions, and Hellman produced a dozen versions before they got a satisfactory working script, but even then the operetta suffered from her heavy, pretentious book. Dorothy was irritated by Leonard Bernstein’s presumption that he knew how to write lyrics. She complained to Hellman that he clearly wanted to handle the whole show himself. Some years later, she was still shaking her head over his mania “to do everything and do it better than anybody, which he does, except for lyrics. The idea was, I think, to keep Voltaire, but they didn’t. But everyone ended up good friends except John Latouche, who died.”
Her single contribution to Candide was the droll lyric for the song “Gavotte.” Leonard Bernstein recalled that Dorothy “was very sweet, very drunk, very forthcoming, very cooperative and, in sum, a dream to work with. I expected it would take weeks of visits and phone calls to get the lyric, but amazingly we had it the next day.” It is hard to imagine Dorothy writing anything overnight, but perhaps she did compose the lyric fairly quickly. The tone of Madame Sofronia’s tabulating of her many woes echoes Dorothy in one of her Lord-how-I-pity-me moods:
I’ve got troubles, as I said,
Mother’s dying, Father’s dead.
All my uncles are in jail.
It’s a very moving tale.
Sometimes she sounds as though she is mocking herself:
Though our name, I say again, is
Quite the proudest name in Venice,
Our afflictions are so many,
And we haven’t got a penny.
In the end, though, Dorothy’s connection with Candide did nothing to enhance her reputation or to alter her penniless state. The show was, she thought, “so overproduced that you couldn’t tell what was going on at all.”
Candide opened in December 1956. Despite the Bernstein score, a stunning production, and admiring reviews, the audiences stayed away and it closed after seventy-three performances.
During the late 1950s, Dorothy finally began to reap long overdue professional rewards from the literary establishment. The National Institute of Arts and Letters had recently set up the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award to honor an older person who was not a member of the Institute for achievement and integrity. In 1958, its third year, the award went to Dorothy. Lillian Hellman had added her name to the list of contenders, which also included Dashiell Hammett that year. When Dorothy received notification of the award in a letter from Malcolm Cowley, then president of the Institute, she failed to acknowledge it for some reason. After friends advised her that it was proper to send a formal letter of acceptance, she felt mortified and immediately wrote to Cowley claiming that she had been “in a state of euphoric stupefaction, never pierced by the idea that I should have answered.” She wanted him to have her official reply, which was “Mr. Cowley—Good God, yes!” The award, incidentally, gave a cash prize of a thousand dollars.
At the awards ceremony, Cowley read a glowing citation that had been composed by Lillian Hellman:
To DOROTHY PARKER, born in West End, New Jersey, because the clean wit of her verse and the sharp perception in her stories have produced a brilliant record of our time. Because Miss Parker has a true talent, even her early work gives us as much pleasure today as it did thirty years ago.
Then, Cowley recalled, an unusual reaction took place. “In 1958 standing ovations were not yet a common occurence. I think there had never yet been one at an Institute Ceremonial. But when Dorothy Parker received her award, the whole audience rose spontaneously as if to prove that, yes, they remembered her work with pleasure. I saw men and women in the audience wiping away tears.”
As a result of the Waite award, Dorothy became acquainted with Elizabeth Ames, who had established the prize in memory of her sister. Ames, eager to help Dorothy, arranged still another honor, an invitation to Yaddo, the four-hundred-acre haven for artists, writers, and composers that she administered near Saratoga Springs, New York. Since 1926, Yaddo had patronized American arts and letters by operating a sort of sleep-away camp. Its impressive list of alumni included Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, and Aaron Copland, who, among many others, had accomplished important work there. It was hoped that Dorothy would do likewise. While she felt honored, she soon discovered that accepting an invitation to Yaddo presented problems that she had not bargained for. An all-expense-paid exile in the country did not affect her obligation to pay rent at the Volney and, worse, Yaddo did not welcome dogs. Not only would she have to board her current poodle, Cliché, so named because “the streets are carpeted with black French poodles,” but she also would be separated from her pet, a far more serious hardship.
To stall Elizabeth Ames, she said that an autumn residence would do just as well as a summer one. “My driving idea is work,” she wrote, “and I do so want an unbroken stretch of it, up there.” She could not resist rubbing Ames’s nose in the matter of the ban on dogs. “Fortunately, I know of a place where she [Cliché] has been, when I have to be away, and she has been well and happy there.” She went on to offer a detailed description of the Connecticut kennel—its floor plan, menus, physical-fitness program. Of course, she reminded Ames, no kennel could provide what dogs wanted most, which was “affection. Well, you know—just like two-legged people.”
The day came when Ames could be put off no further. In September 1958, Dorothy arrived for a two-month stay. She found Yaddo pretty much as advertised: a stone Victorian mansion flanked by woods, a daily routine during which no resident was to be interrupted, and a black metal lunch pail outside her door. In this setting, supposedly idyllic for productivity, she realized at once that she would be devoutly bored. The rustic silence was unnatural. Her writer’s block was invigorated by the country air. The place was filled with the kind of self-conscious, pretentious writers she crossed the street to avoid. Morton Zabel, an English professor from the University of Chicago, was an exception. He struck her as having a fairly decent sense of humor. Sometimes she and Zabel would put their heads together to exchange observations about some of the guests, particularly a pair of hoity-toity young women whose artistic airs had already begun to grate on her nerves.
After Zabel returned to Chicago and Yaddo was drenched by cold autumnal rains, the estate became soggy and unbearably gloomy. She stayed in her room, pleading illness. “The two young ladies are still here,” she reported to Zabel, “and I doubt if you could notice any change in their manners and ways—you might think, though, that they have got rather more so. There are two new arrivals, scraped from the bottom of that barrel, and I rather think that my illness that has kept me to my room was not entirely due to germs.” In November, when her time ran out, she was overjoyed to escape Yaddo. “I can only say it was good to get back from the dreary wet days and the dreary wet people at Yaddo,” she wrote Zabel once she was safely back at the Volney and reunited with Cliché. It was amazing that she lasted two months.
Dorothy managed to accomplish practically nothing at Yaddo. Having been without the distraction of a telephone for two months, one of the great attractions of Yaddo, meant nothing to Dorothy, who solved that problem long ago by simply never picking up a ringing phone. She used her time in Saratoga Springs to polish “The Bolt Behind the Blue,” which Esquire published that December. She also must have worked on her book column, but these were tasks she would have done in any case. Although the entire experience had turned out to be a waste of time and an exceptional bore, she went out of her way to compose a gracious bread-and-butter note thanking Mrs. Ames “a million times” for her kindness. She did not wish to appear ungrateful.
The following spring, she was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, her nomination having been proposed by Van Wyck Brooks and seconded by Louis Untermeyer and Sid Perelman. Brooks termed her a writer of “real importance, unaccountably overlooked, who should have been certainly elected years ago.” That was cold comfort now, although among the dozen new members also selected that year were two equally overlooked women whose company and writings Dorothy had enjoyed since the twenties—Janet Flanner and Djuna Barnes. The Institute insisted on referring to Dorothy as a satirist, a term that usually prompted one of her cracks about “creatures like George S. Kaufman and such who don’t even know what satire is,” but on this occasion she took care to keep her opinions to herself. In her own eyes she was not a satirist, but if they wished to call her one, she would not argue. This time she made sure to reply in writing, cranking out a note so sloppy that it appeared to have been typed in the dark.
Dear Miss Geffen, my typewriter trembles to tell you how truly elated I am to be a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. I didn’t think this could ever happen to me. Now that it has—there is no living with me. Miss Geffen, I can only say, in older words—I will try to be a good queen. With gratitude,
Realizing the letter was a hopeless mess, she tried to avoid the need for redoing it by adding a postscript that blamed the typewriter:
Please forgive the typing. My typewriter has been overcome, ever since it got the lovely message that I had been elected.
The afternoon of the induction ceremony found Dorothy in fragile condition because she had prepared for the event with far too many cocktails. Marc Blitzstein, another new member seated next to her, was obliged to look after her. Upon her introduction, she rose with some difficulty and made a brief speech, which consisted of only one sentence. “I never thought I’d make it!” she declared, then quickly sat down again. This left some of Dorothy’s old friends in the audience blinking and trying to imagine her true thoughts, since it was impossible to believe she had ever given a moment’s consideration to the institute. Afterward, Thornton Wilder reported to Frank Sullivan, “Never did I more wish for mind-reading radar than when she stood up and bowed to the assembly.” As it happened, she was probably thinking of nothing because she was on the verge of passing out. Later, in the middle of the keynote address, a talk about abstract painting by Meyer Schapiro, Dorothy suddenly came to and stood to deliver her speech again. Oblivious of Schapiro, she was distinctly heard to blurt out, “I never thought I’d make it!” Blitzstein managed to subdue her with gentle shushing.
Her gaffe, said Richard Wilbur, is not pleasant to remember, “but it gives some sense of the extent of her drinking at that time: a prepared speech was given both at the right time and at a later, totally wrong, time.” At a reception afterward, her behavior was fine. The star of the party was not a writer at all but Marilyn Monroe, newly married to Arthur Miller, who was there to accept a drama prize. When Louis Untermeyer offered to introduce Dorothy to Monroe, she responded with enthusiasm and wriggled her way to the head of the line.
Arnold Gingrich talked her into participating in a two-day symposium being cosponsored by Esquire and Columbia University, in which her colleagues on the panel were to be a trio of young male writers with big reputations—Saul Bellow, Wright Morris, and Leslie Fiedler. Flattered and swayed by the fifteen-hundred-dollar fee, Dorothy decided to accept. All she had to do was deliver a speech and comment briefly on the role of the writer in America.
The militant styles of Morris and Fiedler caught her by surprise. They began attacking the way America corrupted its writers with foundation grants, prizes, even invitations to perform like tame bears at events like this one. Clearly Morris and Fiedler were eager to bite Esquire’s hand. Since ingratitude had long been Dorothy’s typical reaction to handouts, she felt startled and then indignant. Hearing them beef about how badly writers were treated, a subject on which she had been discoursing for forty years, she perversely rushed to the opposite side. For the first time in years, she had managed to pick up a few philanthropic plums, and she was taken aback to hear these people disclaiming prizes and writers’ camps.
When it came time to deliver her speech the following evening, she was eager to throw sand in the gears of her fellow panelists. Backstage, looking nervous and wobbly, she made a futile attempt to exchange small talk with Leslie Fiedler. “She kept remarking on my teeth with the general air of Little Red Riding Hood remarking on the dentures of the Wolf.” Laying her hand on his shoulder, she said, “Be kind to Mother,” words that mystified him since he was over forty and no longer considered himself particularly youthful. And her references to his teeth were totally puzzling. To Dorothy, the atmosphere of the symposium must have summoned up images of creatures with sharp teeth.
At the podium, she apologized for being alive, confessed apprehension being on the same program with such distinguished gentlemen, and warned that since she, unlike them, was not an intellectual, anything she said would be relatively worthless. Then she got down to business. She couldn’t understand why the men were crabbing. Did the poor dears expect special treatment? A writer, she said, should be prepared to suffer in silence. As for the role of the writer in society, the subject of the symposium, she defined it very simply: The writer was a worker whose business it was to write. She graphically likened her proletarian writer to an Aesop walking through a forest on a dark night, when suddenly a wolf pops out of the trees and bites him on the leg.
“There!” cries the wolf to Aesop. “Go home and write a fable about that!”
She was sick of writers who always found something to bellyache about. They should shut up and get to work. She went on complaining about writers who complained until she could think of nothing more to say and tottered back to her seat.
She was, Saul Bellow thought, the most pleasant of the panelists because “she was the quietest.” She was also the funniest, having taken care to deliver her barbs with humor. The audience laughed approvingly. At the close of the discussion that night, she was surrounded by autograph seekers. When she had time to look up, Bellow, Morris and Fiedler were gone.
Arnold Gingrich sent a letter of congratulations. He thought she had been “terrific” and said, “Actually you said more in inverse proportion to the time you spent on your feet than all the rest of the panel put together.” To Dorothy’s mind, she had made a “truly horrible” spectacle of herself. “I turned my face to the wall and was hostess to an attack of flu.”
She made an appearance with Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, on a television program called Open End. In recent years, she had become friendly with Capote, whom she admired as a writer of quality, but she had never been able to forgive Mailer for the dog incident. Later, she referred to him as “that awful man who stabbed his wife.”
That evening, a limousine picked her up at the hotel and dumped her at a studio in the wilds of Newark, New Jersey, a location sufficiently out of the way to put her in a bad mood. Making no concessions to the requirements of a public appearance, she had dressed herself in a black shawl and shapeless skirt and carelessly applied her makeup. The overpowdered tip of her nose suggested to Mailer the white button of a clown.
If she looked like part of a Ringling Brothers act, the appearances of her co-panelists were equally arresting. Mailer arrived wearing Cro-Magnon chin whiskers suggestive of Fidel Castro’s, and Capote had the slinky air of a tiny, golden Theda Bara. Dorothy quickly rebuffed Mailer’s overtures and plainly showed so much preference for Capote that Mailer was offended.
In the early part of the show, moderator David Susskind tried to put Dorothy at ease, a maneuver she fiercely resisted. In a low, quavering voice, she saluted E. M. Forster, skewered Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac, and declared that the fiction she was condemned to read for Esquire was trash. The sex scenes in current fiction were, she complained, “all the same.” When Susskind wondered what most disturbed her about contemporary America, she listed injustice, intolerance, stupidity, and segregation—particularly segregation.
After that, the proceedings were upstaged by a windy and aggressive Mailer and a tough Capote who demolished Mailer at every turn. As the men increasingly hogged the limelight, Dorothy contributed less and less until finally she sat silently, slumped in her chair, as if she were waiting to be cut down from the cross. Open End was so named because it remained on the air as long as its guests and the moderator liked. On this particular Sunday night in January 1959, Open End continued for almost two hours.
As they walked off the set, they noticed technicians examining a kinescope and stopped to watch. Dorothy glanced at herself and groaned in dismay.
“No,” she protested to Susskind, “I really don’t want to see another instant of it.” He ushered her away with all the tact and delicacy of a funeral director exhibiting a decomposed corpse, and she rode back alone to Manhattan with her ego reduced to the size of a pea.
Aware that she was not telegenic, she nevertheless could not have appreciated reading one reviewer’s unflattering comment that she had resembled Eleanor Roosevelt. Great as her admiration for Mrs. Roosevelt was, she did not care to look like her.
Dorothy, wrote Edmund Wilson in his diary, “had somewhat deteriorated, had big pouches under her eyes.” One Saturday afternoon he visited her at the Volney.
I was glad to see all the evidences of her having returned to her old kind of writing: a typewriter with manuscript beside it, piles of books she is reviewing for Esquire. But it is just the same kind of life that she used to live in New York before she spent so many years in Hollywood. It is as if her work in Hollywood and her twice marrying Alan Campbell had counted for nothing—she might as well have been in fairy-land. Bob Benchley is dead, Campbell has left her again. She lives with a small and nervous bad-smelling poodle bitch, drinks a lot, and does not care to go out.
She served him several drinks, “as was inevitable in this atmosphere of the twenties.” Wilson, feeling as if he had stepped backward in time, went away depressed.
Day to day, the friend she saw most regularly was Bea Stewart, whose East Side apartment became the scene of countless gossipy cocktail hours. A lavish dispenser of very dry martinis and a middle-aged divorcee living without a man, Bea knew about loneliness and boredom. She was a loyal friend, but Dorothy failed to appreciate her properly, devotion or no devotion. The person whose company she most prized was Lillian Hellman, even though Hellman had little time for her and eventually began to avoid her. Dorothy didn’t care. Hellman was a wonderful audience who went into stitches over Dorothy’s remarks, which in turn set off Dorothy’s own laughter. On Saint Patrick’s Day, 1957, Hellman invited her to drive to her house in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Throughout a long day of motoring, Dorothy did her best to keep Lilly entertained with stories disparaging the Irish. Hellman recalled that the invective flowing from her mouth “was amazing in variety and sometimes in length. Driving does not go with laughing too much, and the more I laughed, the more remarkable grew her anger with the Irish. By the time we got to the traffic on Major Deegan Parkway, they were even responsible for Hitler’s Holocaust.” When they finally arrived on the island and Hellman announced her eagerness to prepare a Saint Patrick’s Day supper, Dorothy flatly told her to forget it. She couldn’t possibly eat a bite in the name of Saint Patrick.
“Let’s change the name to Saint Justin,” suggested Hellman, who was not only passionately fond of food but also a good cook.
“Who in hell is Saint Justin?” Dorothy asked.
Hellman could not remember, but that evening she prepared a luscious meal of roast duck, green beans in a warm vinaigrette, and crepes for dessert.
On another drive to Martha’s Vineyard, they broke the journey at Portland, Connecticut, where they stopped to spend the night with Hellman’s close friend Richard Wilbur and his family. Hellman warned Wilbur that Dorothy was permitted only one drink at cocktail time, that this arrangement had been agreed upon between them beforehand. It was apparently a condition of taking her to the Vineyard that she limit herself to a single drink, for purposes of relaxation. This might seem sensible to a nonalcoholic, but for Dorothy it amounted to abstinence. The self-denial, the torment of being unable to assuage her craving, was the same. When drinks were served, Wilbur brought her a martini. For a long while it remained on the table, untouched, seemingly unnoticed, as she chatted easily with the others, who were busy sipping their cocktails. Then, Wilbur recalled, “suddenly she took the drink and drank it off in one motion.”
Hellman’s exacting such a promise may have been as much or more for her sake as for Dorothy’s because her tolerance for hard drinkers was low. Dashiell Hammett’s alcoholism had disturbed her greatly. As his drinking grew more self-destructive after the war, she began to see less of him. He rented an apartment in New York and later, after his release from prison, friends offered him a cottage in Katonah, New York.
Dorothy resigned herself to Lillian’s restrictions. If Lilly sometimes treated her as if she were practically toothless, she managed to overlook that too. Over the years, their friendship had undergone considerable evolution as their importance in the world had somersaulted. Now it was Hellman who glittered as a literary big shot surrounded by sycophants, her bank balance bursting with the fruits of success, while Dorothy stood hungrily in the shadows.
In the early fifties, Hellman wrote a short story, a clear invasion of Dorothy’s province, and presented it to her for an opinion. She hastened to praise the story highly—perhaps too highly Hellman suspected—and singled out one particular phrase as having special merit. Hellman thought she was pulling her leg. Some months later, visiting Hellman’s farm in Pleasantville, New York, she inquired what had become of the story. It was pedestrian, Hellman replied. Dorothy quickly disagreed—it was original and sensitive, in her opinion. As she was saying this, she stumbled over the puppies they had brought along on their walk. Stooping to make sure the dogs were not hurt, she heard Hellman say that God must be dispensing justice by punishing puppies for the lies certain people told their friends. When Dorothy continued to insist that she really did like the story, Hellman walked on.
In silence, they continued to a lake where Hellman intended to inspect some traps that had been set for snapping turtles. Hauling a trap out of the water, she placed it on the ground and they stared at the turtle. His penis, they could see, was erect with fear.
Dorothy pinned on a catlike smile. She said prettily, “It must be pleasant to have sex appeal for turtles. Shall I leave you alone together?” Having paid her back, Dorothy was content to drop the matter.
She enjoyed her invitations to Hellman’s house at the Vineyard, where the sight of the sea and the beaches transported her back to her earliest days in West End. Her apartment lacked air-conditioning and got miserably uncomfortable in summer. The only problem with staying at the Vineyard was Hammett’s dislike of her, an antipathy that had grown more pronounced over the years so that he refused to be around her. When her visits coincided with his absence, everything worked out fine. When they did not, Hammett stubbornly moved out of the house and made sure he did not return until after she had gone back to New York. In the summer of 1960, a few months before he died of lung cancer, leaving was impossible and Hellman told Dorothy that she would have to stay in a guest house down the road. She was not forthright about the reason for this odd arrangement, but it was not difficult to figure out the truth. In the evenings, after Hammett had fallen asleep, Dorothy was invited to join Hellman for dinner, Hellman’s second supper because she had already pretended to eat from a tray in Hammett’s room. That August, Dorothy never saw Hammett once. Out of tact, she asked no questions.
What Hellman wanted, in payment for her kindness to Dorothy, was a seemingly easy favor—for anyone but Dorothy. Hellman wanted to be the sole exception to Dorothy’s habit of belittling people behind their backs. As the years went by and Hellman surrounded herself with apple-polishers, she eventually convinced herself that there were two people about whom Dorothy had never made an unkind remark: herself and Robert Benchley. This fantasy was reinforced by those who wished to get on her good side. The truth was, Dorothy’s nature caused her to abuse everyone except the Murphys. Although she said nothing derogatory about Benchley after his death, she had not spared him during the thirties and forties. She also poked fun at Hellman. She even did it to her face whenever she thought she could get away with it, but Hellman was determined to ignore this.
Her feelings of closeness to people who had suffered for their political beliefs—friends like Hellman, the Mostels, the d’Usseaus—emerged at the expense of certain other old friendships. No longer did she see much of Harold and Alice Guinzburg, and she also began avoiding Sara and Gerald Murphy. “To be anti-Communist,” Gerald observed to Sara, “is to be anti-Dottie, apparently. Too bad.” If the Murphys were far from being militants, they did happen to be liberal Democrats who believed that actors and writers were “rather poor prey” for congressional investigators. During Lillian Hellman’s unsuccessful attempt to have Hammett released on bail after his arrest, Gerald emptied the Mark Cross safe of its receipts for that day and added a personal check to make a total of ten thousand dollars.
Dorothy kept Sara and Gerald at a distance. Whenever she communicated with them, which was not often, she behaved as if nothing had changed. She liked to send amusing items clipped from newspapers. Once it was a “Dear Abby” column about a couple named Dorothy and John who were celebrating fifty years of marriage but fought like tigers at their golden anniversary party. Dorothy pasted the clipping on a sheet of Volney stationery, titled it “TOGETHERNESS!” and added a few tidbits of personal information: “I have been having lumbago. Oh, my God—I have a little poodle named Cliché. I love the Murphys (the last item is not new).” Even allowing for her aversion to letter writing, this piece of mail spoke volumes about the rift that had developed, and it saddened the Murphys. Somehow Dorothy contrived to ignore everyone’s feelings, including her own. To acknowledge that an estrangement had taken place would have been too painful.
Living at the Volney had serious disadvantages when she wanted privacy. Simply to venture outside could be so tricky that Dorothy developed a self-protective maneuver. If she was walking down Madison Avenue and noticed someone she knew coming toward her, she stopped at a shop window and stared fixedly at some object until the person passed by. She cut many an old friend this way. Some people decided that her desire for privacy had to be respected, others concluded that she had become a hermit. Explained an acquaintance of thirty years, “I guess she didn’t want to stand on the street and pass a lot of polite gas with me.”
Attacking either The New Yorker or the Round Table was now practically an avocation of hers. When given the opportunity, she happily announced that the cartoons were still wonderful but that the fiction had gone downhill abominably. The proof was that stories these days always seemed to be tedious accounts of the author’s childhood in Pakistan. At a party given by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams, she got to talking with James Geraghty, the magazine’s art editor. Under the circumstances it would have been politic to keep her mouth shut, but her tongue ran away and she proceeded to give Geraghty a complete airing of her views. He listened with equanimity. There was, she wound up tauntingly, no real wit in The New Yorker anymore.
This last crack proved too much for Geraghty. “You mean like ‘Men never make passes at girls who wear glasses’?” he retorted.
“You son of a bitch!” she hurled back, probably as much annoyed by his misquoting of her verse as his recollection of it.
She rued the day she had written “News Item” and wished she had the power to destroy it. It was “a terrible thing to have made a serious attempt to write verse and then be remembered for two lines like those.” It also made her bilious the way the same old jokes were quoted whenever anyone wrote about her. She told Tallulah Bankhead that she must “even by accident, have said other things worth repeating, if the lazy sons-of-bitches bothered to find out.”
Having once begun to embrace hardship, she elevated necessity to a principle and then martyred herself over it. She was hard up but not quite as broke as she pretended. Nevertheless, she continued to simplify her existence by paying strict attention to nickels and dimes and never going to Lord & Taylor or the Chemical Bank if she could help it. She conducted banking at her favorite liquor store, which was agreeable about cashing checks. Without neo-Puritanical Hellmans or d’Usseaus keeping her on a tight rein, she arranged her days to suit herself. She read books for Esquire, labored over her column, and occasionally accepted invitations to read from her writings at universities or at the Ninety-second Street YMHA, where they paid a tidy hundred and fifty dollars. Her stage fright had remained incurable. Once, before going on stage to speak before a woman’s group, she exclaimed, “Oh shit, what am I doing here!” She also made two long-playing records of her verse and fiction.
During these years she seldom saw Alan, who was living in Hollywood, but she continued to receive news of him from friends. He had a small amount of royalty income from his investments in Mister Roberts and South Pacific, Joshua Logan’s Broadway hits. He managed a tour that the Welsh actor Emlyn Williams made of New Zealand, but beyond this he had no visible means of support. Often he had to live by his wits, aptly and sadly described by a friend as “living on the kindness of friends.” When he was short of money, he stayed at his mother’s house in Bucks County, usually when Horte was in Richmond, or he visited his friend Betty Moodie and her family in Erwinna. Sought after as a weekend guest, he became the unattached man that hostesses needed to round out the numbers at dinner parties. “He was a terribly witty, amusing man,” said Betty Moodie. “It was pathetic but when things got tough there was no doubt that he traded on those qualities just to get by. He would play bridge and be an entertaining companion. He was staying at my place once and I remember him saying that he had to go up to Tallulah’s for the weekend.” Weekend visits also were made to the home of Robert Sherwood’s widow, Madeline, who sometimes gave him discarded clothing—expensive outfits that he passed on to women friends. Often he was heard to remark that he wished Dorothy would stop drinking, or that he was trying to get her off the booze. “It was clear,” Moodie said, “that he wasn’t going to get any work without her.. She had resources if she could pull herself together but he had none.”
If Alan was reduced to trading on his likeability in order to live, he displayed little of this charm around Dorothy when they met. He usually had a chip on his shoulder. She would make what she believed to be a perfectly ordinary remark and he would become antagonistic (or vice versa) and they wound up quarreling. The sight of Dorothy’s apartment displeased him. After a visit to the Volney, he told friends that she was living wretchedly, that he had found her wallowing in filth, and that the dog had littered the carpet.
His quickness to take offense and to belittle her made Dorothy wary about seeing him. The strain of meeting also made him uneasy. Late one night, he stopped by unannounced and brought along a casual acquaintance, Wyatt Cooper. They had run into each other earlier at a party at the home of George Kaufman and his actress wife, Leueen MacGrath, who was a friend of Alan’s. Recently returned from London, Alan and Kaufman had coauthored a musical called The Lipstick War, a surprising collaboration because Kaufman had never particularly liked Alan—nor had he made a secret of his dislike. The Lipstick War was never produced, but that night Alan felt optimistic.
It was late. Since she had been expecting no visitors, Dorothy looked disheveled, and the apartment was cluttered with dog toys on the sofa and soiled newspapers where Cliché had relieved herself. More embarrassing to Dorothy, she had finished every drop of liquor and had nothing to offer guests. After apologizing for her lack of hospitality and the condition of the apartment, she could think of nothing further to say and clammed up. Wyatt Cooper felt immensely uncomfortable and stood around with a frozen smile on his face. The scene, he later wrote, struck him as unreal. “Loneliness and guilt were almost like physical presences in the space between them, and they spoke in short, stilted, and polite sentences with terrible silences in between, and yet there was a tenderness in the exchange, a grief for old hurts, and a shared reluctance to turn loose.”
When all conversation petered out, Alan and Cooper finally took their leave.