Chapter 18
2941-1964
In the spring of 1961, she agreed to join Alan in Hollywood. Unwilling to acknowledge any reconciliation, she characterized the trip as strictly business, because that was the level on which she wished to keep it. After two decades, they had been offered the chance to work together again. Their long-time friend Charles Brackett, now head of Twentieth Century-Fox, ignored Dorothy’s blacklisting and decided to hire them for an adaptation of a French stage play. More precisely, Alan had sought the job and was told he could have it but only on the condition that he send for Dorothy. The Good Soup was not much of a play, but Fox intended the property for its biggest star, Marilyn Monroe. No doubt, this tantalizing bait tempted Dorothy, for she greatly admired Monroe’s beauty and sensitivity. At the same time, she was understandably apprehensive about involving herself with Alan. Not only did it mean uprooting herself from a carefully constructed independence, but also it entailed leaving New York for a place she had always disliked and did not want to be, for a man from whom she had grown apart. Even on a temporary basis, the prospect had its disturbing aspects.
A few years earlier, Alan had invested in property, an inexpensive bungalow in West Los Angeles he was planning to remodel and sell. When he assumed that Dorothy would live with him, she indignantly objected. It was hardly suitable for them to stay together after having been as good as divorced for ten years. She had grown accustomed to privacy. At the last minute, she relented—renting a hotel room would be foolish, she decided— but she continued to grumble lest he take her for granted. “I’m a hobo and mean to be forever.” To prove she felt strongly about her single life in New York, she kept her apartment and did not even notify the Volney that she planned to be out of town. She wrote that the two things she most hated were living in suburbia and “the tedium of marriage.” Moving in with Alan seemed to encompass both.
Norma Place was a block-long street in West Hollywood, named years earlier for silent-screen star Norma Talmadge, whose dressing room and servants’ quarters were located there. The two-story frame building that she once had owned was now divided into handsome apartments occupied by Tuesday Weld, Estelle Winwood, and John Carlyle, among others. The rest of the street was lined with modest homes that originally had been constructed as low-income housing for streetcar workers. Alan had purchased one of these. His was a one-story, white stucco bungalow with combined living and dining room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms. It had a small front yard, a backyard, and a narrow cement walk leading up to an elaborately carved double door.
Norma Place was a sociable street. Residents visited their neighbors’ homes for cocktails, ritually walked their dogs together, and cried on each other’s shoulders in times of sorrow. They also were dedicated news gatherers and gossips who seemed never to have heard of minding their own business. Dorothy christened the street Peyton Place West, but more commonly it was called Swish Alps and Boys Town, because the street as well as the entire neighborhood were heavily homosexual.
Glamorous people abounded on Norma Place. Dorothy Dandridge and Carleton Carpenter owned homes. Nina Foch lived around the corner on Lloyd Place. Judy Garland frequently came to visit friends, and Oscar Levant and Hedy Lamarr attended parties. Still, Dorothy’s coming, a major event, immediately established her as the street’s foremost celebrity. As soon as her taxi stopped in front of Number 8983, it was obvious to her that Alan had misled his neighbors into interpreting her arrival as a romantic homecoming. As well-wishers came to the door, she found herself swept up in a sentimental greeting reminiscent of an Andy Hardy movie. After they departed, Dorothy felt fatigued and testy. Giving vent to her feeling that Alan had greatly overdone the occasion, she declared her loathing for the smell of flowers and pitched the welcoming bouquets of daisies and roses into the garbage can.
On the third of April, they began twelve consecutive weeks of employment that was followed by sporadic work, which lasted until Thanksgiving. For Dorothy, these were cheerful months, a period marked by comparative sobriety and surprisingly good relations with Alan, both at home and on the job. They found congenial company in Wyatt Cooper, who was now working as a writer at Fox and who lived a few doors down the street in Carleton Carpenter’s converted garage apartment. Later, Alan splurged on a new car, a flashy dark-green Jaguar that he called his movie-star car, but at the time he and Dorothy hitched rides to work with Cooper. The young Mississippian, whom Dorothy nicknamed “the Sharecropper,” exhibited a determined eagerness to please. His conduct was interpreted by other Norma Place residents as social climbing, but Dorothy considered him amusing and likeable. She also found his willingness to dance attendance on her and Alan useful, because his presence tended to create a buffer between them.
At the studio, the three of them soon fell into the habit of meeting at noon and taking long lunch breaks in which they drove toward Santa Monica seeking interesting places to eat. They giggled about the secretary the studio had assigned to Dorothy and Alan, a woman far too solemn for their taste, and promised each other sleds for Christmas if they could make her laugh. Before long, the sourpuss secretary had been transformed into a running joke. Eavesdropping on her personal phone conversations, they could hardly wait to report them to Cooper when they met at lunchtime. Dorothy enjoyed loitering in the women’s room, where she picked up the latest studio dirt by listening to the secretaries gossip. All of this provided fresh fodder for a merriment that seems reminiscent of her happiness at Vanity Fair when she worked with Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood.
On one of their lunch hours, they were browsing through a Santa Monica antique shop, a junky sort of place in Alan’s eyes, when Dorothy spotted a set of Napoleon and his marshals, thirteen painted porcelain figurines. For reasons mysterious even to her, she found Napoleon enthralling and had begun reading everything she could find about his life. She insisted on buying the set. At home she arranged it on top of a living room bookcase and asked Alan to install a special light overhead.
All through the summer and fall of 1961 their mood continued to be gay. Having again taken over Dorothy’s correspondence, Alan cheerily wrote to Sara and Gerald Murphy that they were planning a trip to New York and would be thrilled to see them. “If by any chance you come out to Carmel, let us know and we will race up.” Alan wanted to believe he had rolled back the clock to 1936, when it had been possible to go larking from one amusing social engagement to another with himself as Dorothy’s manager. He was counting on the box-office success of The Good Soup—not an unreasonable expectation for a Marilyn Monroe picture—and other assignments surely following.
During the fall, Dorothy was forced to decide whether or not she would stay in California. At first, she had been careful to mail her rent to the Volney each month. By August, feeling increasingly ambivalent, she was neglecting the rent. This lapse brought a polite note from the manager along with a reminder that her lease was due to expire at the end of September and that a renewal on 9E would mean a rent increase to $450 a month. Dorothy procrastinated. The Volney sent a telegram to notify her that if she failed to renew the hotel would be forced to charge her a monthly rate of $600. Hearing this, but still wondering about the wisdom of burning her bridges, she gave up the apartment. Life was proving sweet lately.
Wyatt Cooper noticed the immense pleasure she and Alan found in each other’s company and sensed that this was how it must have been in earlier years. He was delighted to discover that this Dorothy, in marked contrast to the Dorothy he had first met at the Volney with Alan, had a mind as quick and young as a girl’s. Seldom was he aware of the difference between their ages.
When Cooper’s assignment at Fox ended, he applied for unemployment compensation. This was a natural step for a writer who found himself out of work, but it was not one that occurred naturally to Dorothy and Alan, who resisted his suggestions that they should apply too. No doubt they considered it demeaning, but they also expected more film work to be forthcoming at any moment. Neither was convinced that they were entitled to such payments, particularly in Dorothy’s case, because she received a regular income from Esquire as well as royalties from Viking. In the end, Cooper broke down their reluctance. By his calculations, it would mean seventy-five tax-free dollars a week for each of them, which added up to the considerable sum of about six hundred dollars a month.
Their applications were approved, and soon they appeared every week to sign cards claiming their availability for work. Seeing the parking lot full of Rolls-Royces and sporty Cadillacs, Dorothy decided that just as many celebrities could be found at the unemployment office as at Romanoff’s and, she said, “it’s a much nicer set.” Some months later, when signing for the checks had become a part of their regular weekly routine, they realized that The Good Soup did not represent a comeback, in spite of their high hopes. Afterward, Dorothy said in disgust that they had written “a nice, little, innocent bawdy French farce” for Marilyn Monroe, but that Hollywood remained as always, a place where “everybody’s a writer and has ideas.” Fox, she said, no doubt with exaggeration, “took our script and hoked it up with dope pushers, two murders and, straight out of Fanny Hurst, the harlot with the heart of goo.”
The troubles encountered by The Good Soup had more to do with circumstance than with the quality of their script. At that time, Monroe’s contract with Fox called for two more pictures. When the studio gave her a script called Something’s Got to Give, a remake of a 1940 Irene Dunne comedy, she indifferently agreed to do it and a starting date was set for the spring of 1962. Owing to her emotional disintegration, she proved incapable of sustained work and frequently absented herself from the set. Finally, in June, Fox fired her and suspended production on the film. Very shortly the question of whether or not Monroe would be reinstated or eventually go on to make another film became irrelevant because her life ended that August. The Good Soup was never produced.
Long before Monroe’s death, Dorothy and Alan had to face the fact that getting another film job would not be easy. Whenever The Good Soup was mentioned, Alan hurried to change the subject because, a friend recalled, “he knew that he and Dottie were dead at Twentieth.”
Instead of sharing Alan’s double bed, Dorothy preferred the front bedroom with its twin bed and a table where she had set up her typewriter. Even though it allowed some privacy, the house with its tiny rooms felt claustrophobic. During their months at the studio, progress on Alan’s home-improvement projects slowed down considerably. The unfinished kitchen where he had stripped tiles off the counter and torn out cabinets had fallen into a state of permanent rubble. Clara Lester, who had worked for the Eichel family in Richmond during Alan’s childhood, now lived in Hollywood and came in several times a week to clean and cook. She and Alan engaged in a running battle about the condition of the kitchen, since it was practically impossible to cook in there. “He was hard to work for,” Lester recalled, “because he was so fussy about every little thing. But Dorothy was different, so sweet and kind and she didn’t bother a soul.”
Dorothy regarded herself as a guest in the house. If the kitchen was cluttered, it made no difference to her. What she did mind was noise. On those days Alan worked on the repairs, she had to live with hammering. The racket in the house intensified when he decided to buy a dog, a bad-tempered male Sealyham terrier puppy whom he named Limey. It almost seemed as if he felt outnumbered by Dorothy and Cliché and sought an ally. Cliche objected strenuously to Limey. From the minute he entered the house, they were constantly at odds.
Dorothy did not feel entirely comfortable living in Norma Place. The house was Alan’s house, their friends his friends, the way of life one that suited his taste. Even neighborhood parties proved tricky. At one gathering, a young man fell on his knees before her in a reverent pose and placed a notebook of his writings in her lap. Dorothy failed to find his homage touching.
At a cocktail party given by Dana Woodbury, she entered the living room to be confronted by a life-sized nude portrait of her host, which had been painted by Christopher Isherwood’s talented protege, Don Bachardy. Woodbury handed her a cocktail, then asked what she thought of the painting. She gazed at it thoughtfully. She didn’t wish to offend Dana, who had once been a Buddhist monk. In the painting he was seated, facing front, and his genitals had been executed with remarkable attention to detail.
She finally cooed, “Oh, my dear, it’s so real, you almost feel it could speak to you.”
At another party, when some of the guests began gushing over “Big Blonde,” she fumed silently. A man standing nearby apologized for his ignorance of the story. “Miss Parker,” he confessed, “I’ve never read a word you’ve written.”
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Rothwell.”
“Well, Rothwell,” replied Dorothy, “keep it that way and we’ll be friends.”
The nonliterary Robert Rothwell, an acting student, appealed to her because he made no pretense to being an intellectual, did not live in Norma Place, and dated beautiful fashion models. Listening to him talk about his boyhood in Santa Barbara, where he had played basketball, was refreshing to her. Other people for whom she had warm feelings included Nina Foch; an old friend from the thirties, Sally Blane Foster; and actor Clement Brace, who had appeared in The Ladies of the Corridor. Brace lived across the street with his friend John Dall. She also exhibited maternal feelings toward a college boy named Noel Pugh, with whom she liked to whip around town in Alan’s Jaguar. To prepare for these outings, she wrapped a large scarf around her head because, she joked, she feared catching cold and dying. They drove by the Hollywood Ranch Market, where she claimed to be fascinated by a piece of California gadgetry, an immense clock whose hands never stopped revolving to indicate that the market never closed. It had been erected, she swore, as part of a cosmic plot to drive her insane. Whenever Saboteur happened to be playing in the area, she insisted Pugh take her to see it. It was not the film that drew her, but eagerness to watch herself on the screen in her cameo bit with Alfred Hitchcock. Saboteur, like all her pictures, heartily bored her. Once her scene was over she promptly nudged Pugh and announced that she was ready to leave.
A great many gay men lived in the neighborhood. Some of them went out of their ways to do her kindnesses, but she did not feel totally comfortable in homosexual society. Nevertheless, she tried to maintain good relations with her new gay friends and to retain her composure under all circumstances. Behind their backs, she made nasty digs and laughed that one of her more precious neighbors resembled Shirley Temple tossing her curls. Others she dismissed as “kiss-ass bores.”
The fact that Alan elected to make his home in Norma Place and that many of his friends were now homosexual seems to lend credibility to Dorothy’s old suspicions about him. Those who knew Alan at this time believed he was gay, although not sexually active. At parties, recalled Clement Brace, “He would always get drunk and make passes at all the boys,” but that was the extent of his activity. Said Dana Woodbury, “Never in the whole time I knew him did I see him do anything that was bisexual or homosexual. I don’t think he ever did.” Another friend thought that even if he did not sleep with men, he was attracted to them. “He was not a queen, in fact was very manly, but there was no doubt he was homosexual. Having that sort of mate suited Dorothy exactly. I don’t think she was ever very amorous. It was surprising how many gay people hung around their house, but it didn’t have to be that way. If she had wished, there could have been an entirely different crowd.”
Around the neighborhood women, Dorothy did her best to maintain a regal distance. To avoid Estelle Winwood, with whom Alan had lived before he met her, she walked Cliche on the opposite side of the street. When Winwood saw her with the dog one day and called out an invitation to tea, Dorothy declined with ill-feigned sweetness. She was afraid to cross the freeway, she yelled back. Her aversion to screenwriter Hagar Wilde (I Was a Male War Bride) was clearly revealed when she permitted Cliché to do her business on Wilde’s lawn. Wilde turned it into a shoot-out by demanding she clean it up, which Dorothy refused to do. A tiny blonde in her fifties who owned a flock of large, aggressive cats, Wilde angrily threatened to call the police and have Dorothy arrested.
“Just who the hell do you think you are?” fumed Wilde. “The queen of Rumania? If that animal shits on my property one more time—”
“There’s no need to be tasteless, my dear,” Dorothy replied and ambled off.
After The Good Soup, Dorothy and Alan began to talk about writing for the stage, and she instructed Leah Salisbury to “find us a play to adapt—from the French or the Ukrianian or something. We’d love to do it.” Salisbury took her at her word. Before a week passed, she came up with an assignment to adapt the book for a musical. Just as swiftly Dorothy rejected the job: DEAR LEAH SO SORRY BUT AFTER TWO DAYS MULLING ALAN AND I DO NOT FEEL MUSIC AT MIDNIGHT IS FOR US. PLEASE HOWEVER BEAR US IN MIND FOR SOMETHING ELSE. Salisbury continued to present writing projects, but Dorothy found none of them suitable. Nina Foch recalled that “somebody at CBS was always offering her work, but she refused. She would get very grand and turn down things she could have done.” Dorothy insisted that television producers did nothing but talk because there was no contract in the end, not even “a warmly clasped hand.”
Pride prevented both her and Alan from accepting work. He too felt that he had an image to maintain. Prior to Dorothy’s arrival, he was offered an acting job by the producer of the Jack Benny television show. It had been necessary for Ralph Levy, a friend, to wheedle and cajole. Finally, Alan consented only because he thought it might be fun. On the Benny program, he had a special spot in which he sat in the audience and interrupted the show by pretending to represent the sponsor’s advertising agency. He was, according to Levy, “very, very funny. Afterward, I know, he was offered other acting jobs,” but he accepted none of them. Since his early days as a juvenile on Broadway, he associated acting with second-class citizenship.
That winter, Dorothy collected unemployment insurance and wrote for Esquire. If anyone brought up the subject of creative writing, she claimed to have run out of ideas. “Not too long ago I tried to write a story. I got my name and address on the sheet; a title, which stank; and the first sentence: ‘The stranger appeared in the doorway.’ Then I had to lie down with a wet cloth on my face.” Serious problems had developed with her teeth, which entailed a series of long, painful visits to the dentist and “as a result, I have been pretty languid the rest of the time.” Reverting to old habits, she again allowed Alan to manage their daily lives and make decisions about when to pay the bills.
In the spring, three of her short stories were performed on New York television by Margaret Leighton and Patrick O’Neal. Dramatization of “The Lovely Leave,” “A Telephone Call,” and “Dusk Before Fireworks” had been arranged by Leah Salisbury and The Viking Press. For some reason, Dorothy treated the sale with complete lack of appreciation. She told The New York Times that she knew nothing about the forthcoming production except what she read in the papers, although she supposed it had been approved by her agent, “who reads fine type in a contract the way you would a sonnet.” She went on to say that she had been troubled by financial headaches lately and resented having received no compensation for the rights to her stories.
There was not a particle of truth in this, because Talent Associates paid thirty-two hundred dollars for the rights. What made her cranky was that the money would be paid to The Viking Press and then remitted to Dorothy in her regular semiannual royalty checks, which meant that she would not see the payment for another six months. Alan, who spent a great deal of time ranting about how little income Dorothy’s writings brought in, behaved as if the customary system for distribution of authors’ royalties had been newly invented by Viking in order to persecute them. It was “awful,” he wrote to Salisbury and wondered why the Author’s League tolerated publishers who collected interest on authors’ royalties. Dorothy let him bluster and compose protesting letters to Leah Salisbury. It gave him something to do.
During this period, a number of producers expressed interest in adapting Dorothy’s writings for the stage. Most notable was Haila Stoddard, who had enjoyed considerable success with A Thurber Carnival, a Broadway revue based on James Thurber’s pieces and drawings, and hoped to repeat her formula with Dorothy’s material. In collaboration with director John Lehne, Stoddard arranged a half-dozen stories and a sampling of verses into a revue that she titled There Was Never More Fun Than a Man. To embellish the writing, she suggested including two dozen unpublished songs of Vincent Youmans. Stoddard, bubbling with enthusiasm, planned a Broadway show album and passed on to Salisbury Geraldine Page’s remark that even Dorothy Parker’s hiccups were actable. The project was beginning to sound like a winner.
When Dorothy received the completed script, however, she rejected it after a single reading. She felt so upset that she could not write to Leah Salisbury and instead dictated her reaction to Alan, who accordingly typed out a letter to the agent. Dorothy “hated” Stoddard and Lehne’s revision of “Here We Are,” its setting changed from a train to a bedroom where the newlyweds are undressing. She “hated” the additional material they had written. The closing scene in which “Dorothy” plays with a razor, nicks herself by mistake, then recites “you might as well live,” did not appeal to her either. The only part to win her approval was the idea of using Youmans’s tunes. In her opinion, it took a first-rate mind to do a skillful adaptation “and certainly neither Haila nor her collaborator has one.” She was, in truth, deeply disappointed because of all the proposals, Stoddard’s had sounded the most promising. All along she had insisted that her stories did not lend themselves to adaptation because “nothing much really happens in them.” Nevertheless, her hopes were aroused.
During the summer, she and Alan took turns wringing their hands about money and seeking scapegoats—the Jaguar, the house, the renovations. Alan loaded the Jaguar with cartons of review books, some unopened, and barreled around to the Pickwick or various other bookshops to sell them. At Shermart, he purchased the cheapest brand of Scotch and poured it into Black Label bottles. Among those growing concerned about them was Parker Ladd, West Coast editor for Charles Scribner’s. He noticed that Dorothy never seemed to spend any money. With the help of Frederick Shroyer, an English professor at California State College in Los Angeles, Ladd conceived the idea of Dorothy joining the English faculty there, perhaps succeeding to the chair recently vacated by Christopher Isherwood. At first, he said nothing to her but instead tested the idea on Alan, who reacted positively and allowed himself to be enlisted as an accomplice in the scheming that continued for some months. By the time they presented the plan to Dorothy, it was inflated into an honor so significant that to refuse would have been practically equivalent to rejecting the Nobel Prize. During the summer, final arrangements were made with the university for her to become Distinguished Visiting Professor of English. For teaching two courses in twentieth-century American and British literature, she was to receive a handsome salary of twenty thousand dollars. It seemed perfect.
In photographs taken that summer, she was radiant and laughing, her face unusually animated and her eyes girlishly flirtatious under the bangs. Seated behind a coffee table stacked with books, Cliché’s head resting in her lap, she looked lovely.
With the Cal State salary to support them, she and Alan relinquished their unemployment benefits, and now other funds began to trickle in as well. Parker Ladd arranged for her to collaborate with Fred Shroyer on an anthology of short stories for Scribner’s, a project that brought several thousand extra dollars into the Parker-Campbell bank account. Once again the Black Label bottles held genuine Black Label. Unwanted review copies were distributed to friends. Dorothy squeezed two crumpled hundred-dollar bills into the hand of a surprised Robert Rothwell and urged him to take a vacation. Despite the newfound income, she still felt poor. Ladd remembered that she continued to “bitch and complain. Clearly she loved living hand-to-mouth.”
The public lectures that she occasionally delivered on the subject of literature, for a fee of four or five hundred dollars, were also motivated by fear of poverty. Her briefest speech took place at the Monterey Public Library, where she was picketed by American Legionnaires who continued to regard her as a subversive. Some thirty of them stationed themselves conspicuously in the front rows and riveted their eyes upon her, even though they said nothing. After a few minutes, she stopped talking and stared back. Fred Shroyer, who had arranged the engagement, finally had to break the impasse by coming forward and himself speaking for another twenty minutes before declaring the evening at an end.
A student from UCLA came by to interview Dorothy for the college newspaper. Alan, dapper in silk ascot and faultlessly creased trousers, made a production of serving tea and behaved like “a friendly butler who was keeping up the pretensions of a grander era.” Lois Battle thought them a strange couple, and she could not help wondering why the sophisticated Dorothy Parker had chosen such a husband “when she must have had many more opportunities.” Dorothy, only too eager to puncture Alan’s pretensions, took delight in describing herself as “a mongrel. My father was a Rothschild; my mother was a goy; and I went to a Catholic school around the corner.” Those who wished more information about her would just have to “wait ’till I’m dead.” To Battle’s questions about politics, Dorothy reeled out provocative replies, advocating violence of thought and declaring that people who could accept injustice might as well kill themselves.
In the presence of visitors, Dorothy and Alan donned company manners: she was gracious and animated, he came across as deferential to a preposterous degree. Remarks to each other were pointedly prefaced by “dear.” Alone, they lapsed into old patterns of bickering, although the bantering tended to be gentle because they were having good times together. Dorothy likened Alan to “Betty Boop going down for the last time.”
“You are Betty Boop,” he shot back, “and as far as I’m concerned you have gone down for the last time.” Then he added playfully, “Well, it’s the end of the rainbow for both of us, I fear.”
Sometimes Alan was not amusing. One evening when they had invited Cathleen Nesbitt and Wyatt Cooper for dinner, he got unpleasantly drunk and ruined the meal. Dorothy treated him with patience and quietly offered congratulations on the delicious meal.
Her behavior could be equally embarrassing. She often spoke of wanting to meet Igor Stravinsky. Since Miranda and Ralph Levy were friends of the composer, they volunteered to arrange a special dinner party. Dorothy, recalled Miranda Levy, “had had a few nippies beforehand,” arrived at the party drunk, and doggedly refused to address more than a few mumbled words to Stravinsky the entire evening.
It was not unusual for her to become intoxicated at social gatherings, but she did not appreciate Alan doing likewise. She was uncomfortable and complained that he behaved like an old grump. He used to be fun when he drank, she said.
Her time was occupied by classes, the book with Shroyer, and her Esquire column, but Alan had nothing to do. He talked about a number of projects, including a screenplay collaboration with his friend Bill Temple-ton, and he also promised to reserve one day a week for work on the house. He wanted to convert the garage into a rental apartment. Little progress seemed to take place with any of these tasks. Much of the time he appeared to be at leisure, strolling about the neighborhood with the dogs or carting groceries home from Shermart, always wearing his pink sailor hat. Some afternoons he agreed to drive Dorothy to Fred Shroyer’s house in Monterey Park. While they discussed selections for the anthology, Alan and Shroyer’s wife Patricia passed the time playing cards. It was always Dorothy who abruptly gave the signal for their departure. “The doggies will be needing their din-din,” she said.
Usually their social life depended on Alan. If he wanted to accept an invitation, they would go out; if he felt like cooking, they would have company. Otherwise they spent quiet evenings at home with Dorothy lounging on the sofa reading, chain-smoking, and sipping Scotch. She ignored ashtrays and allowed the cigarette to burn down to her fingers before knocking off the ash. Both she and Alan had so little interest in television that they did not buy a set. They owned a stereo but seldom turned it on. Questioned by a reporter about what she did for fun, she answered, “Everything that isn’t writing is fun.”
She continued to write for Esquire, but she was finding the work grueling after four years. It was not surprising that she began to miss more deadlines than ever. Meanwhile, review copies arrived almost daily and were stacked on tables and chairs until there was no place to sit. When Alan felt energetic, he opened the packages and sorted through the books, selecting those he thought she might like and sometimes even skimming them for her.
If Arnold Gingrich once had imagined the high-forceps system to be foolproof, he now realized his mistake. It was necessary to hold forms until the very last minute. Often he obtained the column only after frantic telephoning to ask when he might expect it. “I sent it days ago,” Dorothy told him when she had not written a word. Sometimes, by skillful begging, he persuaded her to dictate a few paragraphs over the phone. Gingrich figured out that whenever she missed a month, she was apt to miss the next as well, but then the third month she might come through if he kept his fingers crossed. When he did get a column, it was good enough to excuse the absent ones. Eventually he was reduced to addressing playful letters to “Dear Dorothy Dix”:
I was fifty-nine on my last birthday. I publish a magazine. In it are what is called departments. These are about a number of things. One of them is about books when it is ...
What am I to do? The lady who writes about books must not enjoy it. Maybe that just shows she is a lady.
Please advise me, dear Dorothy Dix.
Gingrich signed himself “Perplext,” but “Dorothy Dix” was not disposed to advise him and did not reply. Therefore he was jolted to discover her teaching at Cal State, doing the kind of job he “could have sworn she wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole,” and he marveled that “the only thing you can expect from her is the unexpected.”
Dorothy could not summon up the confidence to quit the magazine and insisted she needed the money. By now Esquire had been added to the list of topics that she and Alan regularly squabbled over. With relish, he nagged her about missed deadlines. She pretended that his noisy hammering and sawing prevented her from writing and sent him to Wyatt Cooper’s place for the afternoon. When he returned, she announced that she had written the column and deposited it in the mailbox, when Alan knew this was certainly a lie. On leaving the house once, he carefully stretched a hair across the keyboard of her typewriter to trap her.
Innocent of the dramas taking place in West Hollywood, Gingrich continued to pay her in the hope of obtaining further columns. Her last reviews for the magazine, as it turned out, were published in December 1962.
She had imagined Cal State as “an academic paradise under the elms.” Instead, she was surprised to discover “18,000 students and 150 parking spaces.” The seventy-two students who registered for her classes failed to fit her picture of college kids. Most of them were over twenty-five, some were veterans with families to support, and a few appeared to be middle-aged. Fred Shroyer promised that it would be a privilege and an inspiration for them to hear her reminiscence about the writers she had known personally, about Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Shroyer was wrong. Dorothy’s students were there to obtain three credits, not from any interest in literature. Many of them failed to get much pleasure from reading. To most of them, her name meant absolutely nothing. If at the outset that made her feel like their “grandmother’s grandmother,” she soon realized they were unfamiliar with practically all writers. If they had never heard of James Joyce or read Faulkner, she reminded herself, “Why would they have heard of me?” She found their political conservatism and their general narrowness of mind to be disgraceful. When she assigned The Grapes of Wrath, some of them called it obscene, and one said that her mother didn’t want the book in the house. While studying Sister Carrie, Dorothy found herself in the ridiculous position of having to defend not only Dreiser but also adultery in literature. It only stood to reason that their writing skills would disappoint her. She discovered only three of them were able to put together a sensible English sentence.
In preparation for the job, Dorothy bought new clothes. She took particular care with her hair and makeup, and she arrived at her classroom composed, patient, and sober. Sometimes, after only ten or fifteen minutes, she ran out of things to say. She confided to Sally Foster that she found the job humiliating. Teaching at a city college was fine for a younger person, she said, but she was nearly seventy, just a little too old for this sort of pressure. In an effort to maintain a benign attitude toward her students, she went to extremes. “I never give a bad mark,” she told Foster, “and I never fail anyone.” As Parker Ladd came to realize, “She was not a successful teacher. She had absolutely no connection with those students and couldn’t figure out how to communicate with them. About a third of the time she didn’t show up for class.”
Ladd and Shroyer had counted on Alan’s participation, because he had expressed so much initial enthusiasm for the job. They expected him to read and grade papers, or at the very least to chauffeur Dorothy back and forth to the campus, nearly an hour’s commute each direction. But Alan, suddenly quite peevish, surprised them by refusing to perform these services.
By the beginning of 1963, it was not unusual for him to drink all day, starting with Bloody Marys for breakfast and continuing until bedtime, when he would finish off the day with a Scotch nightcap. To some of his neighbors, he appeared “stoned,” which was an accurate impression because he was addicted to barbiturates. Dorothy had grown accustomed to his sedatives. He had used them ever since she had known him, and by now they were so much a part of his routine that questioning the habit never occurred to her. Alan even had to take a sleeping pill for an afternoon nap because, she once joked to Lillian Hellman, “he hates to toss and turn from four to six.”
What concerned her now was his heavy drinking, which made him aggressive, sloppy, and sullen. She mentioned to Noel Pugh that she feared him when he was drunk. Her requests to be taken out for a ride in the Jaguar often occurred when Alan had been drinking and she needed to escape from the house for a while. Pugh noticed that
they were fighting like hell. There were some pretty nasty fights about Alan’s mother, and sometimes he cried. He was drunk most of the time, and she was drunk half the time.
Dorothy was not above needling him, aiming straight for the jugular with snipes about his being “worthless.” She would tell him, “You’ve never been able to earn your own living.” It angered her that after thirty years he still depended on her labors, her name.
Alan devised a novel means of escape. In a library somewhere he had once seen a bookcase that cleverly concealed a secret door, just the sort of gadget that he adored. Removing the door from his bedroom, he replaced it with one of the trick bookcases and filled the shelves with books. The door could be opened from either side by a hidden release if one knew where the catch was located. After a screaming quarrel with Dorothy, or when he wished to be alone, he stormed behind the bookcase door and placed himself beyond her reach.
With Alan barricaded in his room, she consoled herself with Cliché’s litter of three puppies. Since they had no noticeable personalities, she began referring to them as Premiere, Deuxième, and Troisième, the order of their births. There were five animals in the small house, but she insisted that you could never have too many dogs. The finish on the hardwood floors was soon past redemption, and there always seemed to be a mess somewhere.
Throughout the spring, the friction in the house continued to mount. At times she humored Alan. In recent months he had championed a friend of his who wanted to make an independent film of The Ladies of the Corridor and asked for a ninety-day option without payment. Dorothy and Arnaud d‘Usseau were agreeable, and Leah Salisbury could see no harm in giving Eugene Solow the free option, although for sixty days instead of the ninety he had requested. The option period passed before Solow could arrange financial backing. When he asked for an extension, Salisbury turned him down. Alan, upset, was unwilling to let the project drop. He and Dorothy should write a screenplay and then form a corporation to purchase the rights for five thousand dollars, he suggested. This time both Salisbury and d’Usseau reacted coolly to the plan.
To Dorothy’s immense relief, the job at Cal State was nearing its end. Shortly before the close of the semester, she spouted off to the Los Angeles Times that her students were the stupidest people on the face of the earth. She described them as humorless, hopelessly crass, illiterate prigs who only wanted a college education so they could make lots of money. At the last minute she made a half-hearted effort to soften her indictment by saying the fault was probably hers—she was a poor teacher.
The next day she arrived at the classroom to discover that some of her students read newspapers and did not appreciate her remarks. Furthermore, they were not shy about expressing their resentment. On the blackboard they had listed every allegation they could dig up regarding her allegiance to the Communist Party. Their actions only confirmed what she had felt all along, that they hated her as much as she hated them.
The fourteenth of June began with Alan gulping a round of Bloody Marys. When Clara Lester arrived later that morning to clean, she found him “drunk as a skunk. It was pathetic how he was staggering all over the place.” He insisted on going out to pick up his dry cleaning. When he got back to the house, he admitted stopping once or twice to pull himself together.
Dorothy was dressing to go out. The previous week Sally Foster had led her to a sale on good dresses and a new hairdresser. She received so many compliments that she had made another appointment with the same stylist. When she saw Alan, he was carrying his bag of dry cleaning. Saying that he planned to lie down for a while, he disappeared behind the bookcase.
She returned home in the late afternoon. When she called to Alan through the bookshelves, there was no answer. She continued to call out more urgently. Finally, with a great deal of difficulty, she managed to locate the spring release and step into the room. He was curled up on the bed with the stub of a cigarette clenched between his fingers and the plastic cleaning bag draped around his neck and shoulders. Limey jumped onto the bed and began barking and tugging at the plastic. As Dorothy bent down to shake Alan, she noticed that the floor next to his bed was sprinkled with Seconal capsules. He felt strange to her touch and only then did she realize that “rigor mortis had already set in.”
The coroner’s report showed that Alan had died of “acute barbiturate poisoning due to an ingestion of overdose” and listed him as a probable suicide. None of his friends believed he had intentionally killed himself. A few days earlier, he had strolled into Nina Foch’s courtyard with the dogs and struck her as looking unusually sad. “I don’t think he meant to kill himself, but I also felt that he’d not unaccidentally done this thing,” Foch said. Dorothy told the papers that Alan had exerted himself while remodeling the house. She added that he had a history of heart trouble. To friends, she continued to maintain that the death was a mishap.
In the first hours after Alan’s death, the little house was crowded with friends and neighbors. Dorothy greeted new arrivals at the door with invitations to fix themselves a drink, then repeated the details of how she had found Alan cold behind the bookshelves. Eventually, someone remembered Alan’s family. A call was placed to Richmond, and Dorothy came to the phone to speak with Roy Eichel. “She asked me what should be done with the body. I told her that Horte would want Alan to come home and be buried in the family plot, next to where her grave would be.” He was a little surprised when she readily agreed.
The finality and abruptness of Alan’s departure at the age of fifty-nine stunned her. Torn between anguish and anger, she had a hard time responding civilly to expressions of sympathy. A woman who had been fond of Alan and who had always pretended to like her, although Dorothy doubted it, came over to offer condolences and assistance, as had many people that evening. How could she help? she asked.
“Get me a new husband,” Dorothy replied without a flicker of expression.
The shocked woman said that the remark was the most vulgar and tasteless she had ever heard.
“I’m sorry,” Dorothy told her. “Then run down to the corner and get me a ham and cheese on rye. And tell them to hold the mayo.”
Three days later, she shipped Alan’s body to his mother in a bronze casket, the most expensive one she could buy. He was buried in the Hebrew Cemetery next to his Uncle Mann and, three years later, Horte was placed on his other side. Alan’s childhood friend Joseph Bryan and other friends and classmates from Virginia Military Institute served as pallbearers.
Dorothy did not attend the funeral, nor did she arrange a memorial service in Los Angeles. The whole ritual of dying, the blubbery condolences, the eulogizing of the deceased, struck her as ridiculous. It was just as well that she remained ignorant of the furor taking place in Richmond. When the coffin arrived, Roy Eichel was so shocked by Alan’s appearance that he suspected the wrong person had been shipped. The corpse did not even look like his nephew. Concerned about Horte’s reaction, he rushed home to find a photograph so that the embalmer might make up the face to resemble Alan as a younger man.
It was a hot, smoggy summer in Los Angeles, made all the more stifling because the living room windows, which extended down to the floor, could not be opened without the dogs’ running out. That autumn she received a visit from the Associated Press because she had turned seventy in August. She certainly didn’t feel seventy, she said—she felt ninety. If she had any “decency,” she would be dead, she added, because “most of my friends are.” During the interview, she sipped straight Scotch. Soon she would be leaving for New York where she planned to resume her Esquire column and publish another collection of short stories, the last an extraordinary statement because she had not written a story in five years. She wanted to be “taken seriously” as a short-story writer and “by God, I hope I make it.” It was hard to make herself heard over the barking of the dogs. “Oh, children,” she scolded, “please!”
Her references to Alan were limited to a fervent declaration that she and her late husband had spent “29 great years together.” She made them sound like Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and probably at the time that was the way she wished to regard their marriage.
In the months after his death, when she was numbed by intense misery, a number of good Samaritans stepped forward to look after her, but she resisted them. Perhaps the person toward whom she felt least antagonistic was Sally Foster, whom she called “my angel” and came to depend upon. In the mornings, she prepared herself tea and toast and opened cans for the animals, but that was all she could manage. Each day Foster came to the house with a casserole or freshly baked bread; she made sure that Dorothy had clean clothes, and she picked up the open cans of dog food that were spoiling in the corners; she was sensible, cheerful, and devoted. Concerned about Dorothy’s drinking, she begged her to abstain at least until five o’clock. Sometimes she hid bottles on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinets where Dorothy could not reach them.
“We don’t have any liquor in the house,” Dorothy reminded her.
“Of course you do,” Foster replied. “It’s right where it always has been.”
But what good was inaccessible Scotch? Instead of arguing, she made a trip to Shermart and bought more.
On the afternoons that Charles Brackett visited, he usually brought something to drink. Fred Shroyer, turning up with wine and a loaf of her favorite San Francisco sourdough bread, told her playfully, “I’ve got the wine and the bread and now you must supply the verses.” So many friends invited her to restaurants that it seemed people were obsessed by her nutrition. Dorothy, however, was all but oblivious to food. Lack of appetite resulted in loss of weight and strength and, eventually, malnutrition. Invited to John Carlyle’s house for dinner, she stared at two lamb chops on her plate but felt too weak to deal with them. Her host cut the meat for her.
She wanted to show appreciation, but the well-meaning, solicitous people got on her nerves. Sitting on the sofa while watching Sally Foster bustle around with a dustcloth gave her a seizure of guilt because she knew Sally had her own family and home to look after.
“You shouldn’t be doing that,” she told her.
Foster shrugged. “Somebody has to do it.”
Dorothy lit another Chesterfield. Now that she was smoking two or sometimes three packs a day, her usual cough had become even worse. “My God,” she murmured, “it’s awful to get old, Sally.”
She fiercely resisted people trying to straighten out her life, even though her helplessness provoked it. All she wanted was to be left alone so that she could drink in peace. In this goal she often succeeded. Nina Foch noticed that she looked like a sleepwalker when she walked the dogs. “When she stepped off the curb you knew she didn’t even see it.” On four occasions, she lost her balance and fell in the street. Once, when she was bleeding from a cut on the back of the head, she stubbornly refused to go to the hospital. In November, after she complained of severe arthritic pain in her shoulder, friends finally induced her to see a doctor. X-rays showed that it was broken. On the weekend of John Kennedy’s assassination, she was in Cedars of Lebanon hospital. With the other women in her room, she kept her eyes glued to the television set the entire time. Sunk in sorrow, she scarcely noticed her surroundings or her broken shoulder.
Other physical problems arose after Alan’s death. When her legs and feet began to swell, her doctor advised keeping her feet elevated to alleviate the edema. Clement Brace rigged up a special pillow that she could take wherever she went to prop up her legs. Since the broken shoulder made it painful to lift her arms, she had trouble dressing and undressing. After an evening with Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, she slept in her clothing. First thing the next morning, she called Sally Foster. “You have to come over here right away and unzip my dress.”
Although Sally Foster was devoted to Dorothy, her patience had limits. One day she stopped in to take care of business connected with Alan’s insurance. It was after five, and Dorothy had a visitor who was taking her out for dinner. Irritated by Foster’s appearance, she did not wait until her friend was out of earshot before giving vent to her feelings. “Wouldn’t you know it,” she said to her guest. “She had the whole day to do this and she has to get here just as I’m going out.” This hurt Foster so deeply that she never returned to the house.
Various other Samaritans took her place. As always, Dorothy was adept at getting people to do favors for her.
Since the day of Alan’s overdose, she refused to set foot in his room. She did not want to touch his clothing or possessions. Friends were forced to rummage through bureau drawers to learn that he had made no will and that a tiny insurance policy named Horte as his beneficiary. Dorothy, in the meantime, continued to mourn by secluding herself indoors and drinking as much as was practical. In the early months of 1964, she finally began to emerge from her lethargy and organize a departure. The house was put on the market and eventually sold to actress Peggy Sears, although most of the down payment had to be used for termite control. Cliché died, and she gave away Limey and two of the poodle puppies, keeping for herself only Troisième, whose name she shortened to Troy. As for the household furnishings, she was emphatic about getting rid of the last spoon. She wanted to make “a clean sweep” when she left California.
Since it looked as if she was going to walk away and simply abandon the furniture, Miranda Levy offered to arrange a house sale and placed advertisements in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. On the morning of the sale, she tried to talk her into leaving the house and spending the day at Estelle Winwood’s. Levy thought it would be, painful for her to watch strangers handling her belongings. But Dorothy planted herself in an armchair and sat there watchfully, holding a peculiar kind of court. A sizable crowd showed up, gawkers as well as bona fide purchasers. Levy thought it strange how little visible reaction Dorothy had to the whole proceedings. Even though she obviously needed the money, she seemed determined to undermine the sale. Several times Levy heard her tell a buyer, “Here, you can have it.”
Few of Dorothy’s friends showed up. Some dismissed the articles as valueless, while others felt intimidated. If she had bought anything, Sally Foster said, “Dottie would have thought that I was just waiting to get hold of it. That was the way her mind worked.”
At the end of March, she was escorted to the airport by Clement Brace and John Dall, who shepherded her into the plane with her foot pillow, arranged Troy on her lap, and kissed her good-bye. In her blue-and-white polka-dot dress and her red shoes, she looked like a patriotic, bedraggled sparrow.