Chapter 19
1964-1967
Little had changed at the Volney. Dreamlike, the fading women took up their stations in the lobby, the same bowls of fruit and trays of pastries waited expectantly in the dining room entrance, and the tiny passenger elevator continued to present hazards for corpses. The hotel looked like a stage set for a fictitious New York hotel on the Upper East Side.
She moved into an apartment on the eighth floor, a little smaller than the one she’d had before and slightly less expensive. Aside from a few pots of ivy and the addition of a shelf for her Napoleon figures, she made no attempt to alter the basic institutional look of the place. All furnished apartments, she said, tend to resemble dentists’ waiting rooms anyway.
For the remainder of that year and continuing well into 1965, she was in and out of the hospital, “so sick I couldn’t write a darn thing.” Her broken shoulder still troubled her and she developed bursitis in the other shoulder. She made jokes about her cardiovascular problems, saying that “the doctors were very brave about it” but did not find her hospitalizations for pneumonia, broken bones, and fractures caused by various spills at all amusing. She fell a lot, no matter how careful she was. Some of these mishaps occurred while she was drinking, but by no means all of them. The dismaying truth was that she had shrunk to eighty pounds and her eyesight had deteriorated so badly that she could see little without her glasses. In August, when biographer Nancy Milford came to see her about Zelda Fitzgerald, she found Dorothy with her arm in a sling, living with a practical nurse. Health permitting, she nearly always agreed to interviews because she was all too seldom the center of attention now. Company propelled her into brief bursts of energy and provided occasions to put on one of the pretty pastel dusters that she liked to wear. Milford arrived with an armful of daisies, homage that pleased Dorothy very much. Zelda, she informed Milford, was not a particularly beautiful woman. According to Dorothy, she had the sulky kind of face usually found adorning the lids of candy boxes. In retrospect, she wished that she had been kinder to poor Zelda. She impressed Milford as “a bird in hiding. As I was leaving and going to the elevator, I could still see her peeking around the door.” Others, who knew her well but had not seen her since she went west to rejoin Alan, found her physical changes shocking. Alan’s death had aged her greatly. Meeting her at a party, Stella Adler was appalled to see how frail and wasted she was, as if she were “a hundred years old.”
She could not get along without the nurse, a middle-aged woman who wore a frilly organdy apron over her uniform. The nurse was Dorothy’s daily companion for almost a year because she could not bathe herself. Even after she had regained her strength, she still needed help with dressing and lifting. The woman’s presence was probably therapeutic in other respects because it gave Dorothy a reason to complain. And she did—about the nurse’s stupidity, her high-handed manner, the plastic tablecloth she had bought for the apartment, a tablecloth so dreadful that it could not even pass for pop art.
Someone pointed out that it would be prudent to put her affairs in order by making a will. One of Lillian Hellman’s attorneys, Oscar Bernstien, came to the Volney to draw up the papers. It did not take long to dispose of her estate, since in her view she had no estate whatsoever, neither property nor insurance. Taking inventory, she was forced to concede that she did own fifty or sixty shares of New Yorker common stock that she guessed might be worth something, and she also had two savings accounts at the Chemical Bank, containing the money she had collected from the sale of the Norma Place house. Modest as these assets were, she knew exactly what she wanted done with them. When Bernstien arrived, she told him that her estate, plus any copyrights and royalties from her writings, were to go to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and in the event of his death, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This bequest did not cause Bernstien to blink an eye. As his widow, Rebecca, said, “He understood completely what she had in mind. It seemed natural because she had no heirs, and racial injustice had always affected her very deeply.” Dorothy wanted Lillian Hellman to act as her literary executor. She also directed that her body was to be cremated and that there be no funeral services, either formal or informal.
After making the will, she joked to Zero Mostel that the least she could do was die. She was by no means ready, however.
For the first time in her life, she had a legitimate pretext to avoid writing. “I can’t use my typewriter,” she announced with the triumph of a person who has spent fifty years seeking such an excuse. Since she was unable to write, naturally she wanted to. “The people at Esquire have been wonderfully patient, and I hope to get back to work very soon,” she said. She stacked the review copies still being sent to her on the floor behind an armchair. She also talked about writing “more stories and maybe a play. I’d love to do another play.” In recent years she had become increasingly preoccupied with the idea of “making it” as a writer, whatever that term meant to her. Five years earlier, on her induction into the National Institute of Arts and Letters, it seemed as though she might have “made it,” but that assurance had quickly worn off. In her own eyes, she definitely had failed to make it and probably never would, no matter what the National Institute decided about her worth. Still, the thought of dying after a lifetime of meager accomplishment filled her with shame and melancholy.
Even though holding her arms up to the typewriter for more than a few minutes was an immense effort, she managed to compose a thousand-word caption to accompany John Koch’s paintings of Manhattan life. In the November 1964 issue of Esquire, she contributed a lyrical tribute to his graceful ladies and gentlemen, an evocation of the world of Edith Wharton and Henry James that perhaps recalled some precious shadows from her own past:
I am always a little sad when I see a John Koch painting. It is nothing more than a bit of nostalgia that makes my heart beat slower—nostalgia for those rooms of lovely lights and lovelier shadows and loveliest people. And I really have no room for the sweet, soft feeling. Nor am I honest, perhaps, in referring to it. For it is the sort of nostalgia that is only a dreamy longing for some places where you never were.
And, I never will be there. There is no such hour on the present clock as 6:30, New York time. Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you’ll live through the night.
It was her final magazine article but not her last piece of writing. That was for Roddy McDowall, a talented photographer as well as actor, who was publishing a volume of his photographs and asked her to contribute a brief commentary for two pictures of Oscar Levant, a man she had always liked. The four paragraphs she gave McDowall for Double Exposure were badly typed and full of typographical errors, actually not even very well written, but they were pointedly honest. In paying tribute to Levant, she became defensive on his behalf, although it is possible to see how she may have been identifying with him. “Over the years, Oscar Levant’s image—that horrible word—was of a cocky young Jew who made a luxurious living by saying mean things about his best friends and occasionally playing the piano for a minute if he happened to feel like it.” Even though people said Levant felt sorry for himself, she said, “he isn’t and never was; he never went about with a begging-bowl extended for the greasy coins of pity. He is, thank heaven, not humble. He has no need to be.”
She was uncomfortably aware of her own begging-bowl extended in pretend meekness. Hospital bills were a great problem, because she had no medical insurance and depended on the sudden materialization of Samaritans to bail her out. Unfortunately, Samaritans were in increasingly short supply. It became necessary for the faithful Bea Stewart to make phone calls notifying various people about Dorothy’s plight. On one occasion, after Stewart’s canvassing had produced no results, she hesitantly sought out Lillian Hellman. When Dorothy learned of it, she was furious and called Bea “a damned little meddler” who had no shame calling half of New York and describing Dorothy as “a pleading beggar.” In emergencies, Hellman was her next-to-last resort. Her final resort was The Viking Press, to which she turned in times of extreme desperation. Harold Guinzburg was dead, and the place was full of strangers, who no doubt found her more a burden than an asset as an author.
Throughout these years, her royalties from books and recordings brought in a modest income. Occasionally there would be a reprint, for example twenty-five dollars from the Readers’ Digest, but generally the check was so small that it hardly seemed worth a trip to the bank. Sometimes she tossed the check into a drawer and forgot about it, an old habit that used to drive Alan crazy. Some of her friends, mystified about the source of her income, speculated that she must be receiving checks from wealthy benefactors. The list of those who were assumed to have covered her expenses included John O’Hara, Quentin Reynolds, and Joan Whitney Payson. If this was true, Dorothy never acknowledged the charitable contributions. As one who had no problem taking from the rich, she was not prepared to refuse “greasy coins of pity,” but on the other hand, she saw no reason to publicize it either.
In the meantime, Leah Salisbury continued to encourage first-class producers who might successfully adapt Dorothy’s work for the stage. To represent her now, especially when she was ill or depressed, a literary agent had to be inventive. Immediately after Alan’s death, Salisbury was unsure of her address. She had been obliged to issue a firm warning that “this time I must hear from you, Dorothy,” and suggested a novel system of communication. “To make it easy for you I send you an additional copy of this letter, and a spot below marked both ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ ” Salisbury instructed her to check one and “to make the whole business still easier here is an addressed return envelope.” Dorothy had meekly penned an X next to her name and mailed back the letter. At the Volney, when she felt unwell and asked the switchboard to hold her calls, Salisbury was screened out with the rest. She left stacks of messages. After a while, feeling pressured or guilty, Dorothy returned Salisbury’s calls. It was not a particularly ideal way to conduct business, but it worked well enough.
In the spring of 1965, she began to recover and enthusiastically sent the nurse packing. For the remainder of that year and for much of the following one, she awoke in the morning feeling more cheerful than she had in a long while. Once again her name appeared in newspapers and magazines. She welcomed a reporter from the Ladies’ Home Journal but warned she would not discuss the Algonquin. For an Associated Press photographer, she carefully dolled herself up in her polka-dot dress and pearls, posing demurely under the shelf of Napoleon generals with Troy balanced on her lap. A story on the society page of the New York Herald Tribune described her as “a bird that has had a tough winter, but is beginning to grow new feathers.” It was true that she did feel rejuvenated. Suddenly she longed to romp in society, go to restaurants, attend new plays, even visit a discotheque. For the first time in twenty years, she made an excursion to the Algonquin Hotel, where she had made a date to meet friends. While waiting in the lobby, seated in an armchair facing the entrance to the Rose Room, she quickly drew the attention of the hotel management. Andrew Anspach came over to greet her. During their conversation, he could not resist asking her if she disliked the Algonquin because over the years she had made many derogatory remarks about the hotel. Dorothy smiled. That wasn’t the case at all, she assured him, “but it’s difficult to get terribly interested in food I digested forty-five years ago.”
About this time, she renewed her friendship with Wyatt Cooper, who was married to Gloria Vanderbilt and living in New York. One evening she accompanied them to the United Nations to hear a recital by Libby Holman. After the concert, at a party at the singer’s brownstone, Dorothy posed for photographs with Holman, Mainbocher, and Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper. In contrast to Mrs. Cooper, whose smile stretched forever, Dorothy was wearing a sour, quizzical expression, possibly reflecting her displeasure with the Coopers, who had lured her to the concert with the promise that Jacqueline Kennedy would be joining their party. The former first lady failed to show up. It turned out to be a festive evening during which many people fussed excessively over Dorothy, but her pleasure was ruined. She vented her disappointment by dressing down the Coopers for inviting her “under false pretenses.”
Equally annoying was Truman Capote’s oversight when he neglected to invite her to a ball he was planning at the Plaza Hotel, an event that the papers were billing as the party of the century. She lost no time telephoning Tallulah Bankhead to express her indignation, which Bankhead passed along to Capote. He admitted that he had forgotten to put Dorothy’s name on the guest list. Bankhead told him that was exactly Dottie’s point; she wanted to attend so that people would know she was still alive. Capote maintained that it was too late and that it would be rude to invite her at the last minute.
When a young man from radio station WBAI came to tape an interview with her, she felt extremely frisky. Richard Lamparski was just beginning a career that nostalgically chronicled the lives of celebrities past their primes. Especially adept at handling women, he captured Dorothy at her most fey by flattering her outrageously. Given an opportunity to run through her entire act, she described herself as a relic from the “long, long days ago” when she had been known as “the toast of two continents—Australia and Greenland” and professed amazement that anybody still remembered her name.
She took a liking to Lamparski, who invited her to movies at the Museum of Modern Art and entertained her with stories about the stars he met in the course of his work. When she heard that he was scheduled to visit Christine Jorgenson in the Long Island suburb of Massapequa, she expressed surprise. What on earth was Jorgenson doing in a place like Massapequa? Lamparski guessed it was because she took care of her mother, who happened to live there. Dorothy avidly pressed for more details. “Have you met her mother?”
“Not yet,” said Lamparski. “Why?”
“Because I’d be very interested in knowing what sex she is,” said Dorothy.
Having nothing better to do, she indulged her love of gossip. Apart from a desire to know what Jackie Kennedy ate for breakfast and the sex of Christine Jorgenson’s mother, she followed the doings of the rich, the famous, and the social. As a joke, someone gave her a subscription to Women’s Wear Daily, a fashion paper known for its coverage of such personages, but it was no joke to Dorothy, who devoured each issue with glee, mocking socialites such as Mrs. William Paley and Mrs. Winston Guest and calling model Jean Shrimpton “preposterous.” She found them as diverting as fictional characters and refused to listen when anybody suggested that the “Beautiful People” were not as bad as she assumed. They were as bad, she insisted; they were “idiots” who made her feel “sick” but, she said, “I love to read about them.”
Her other pastime was watching her television set, a piece of equipment she had acquired in the hopes of drowning out the nurse’s chatter—“but she talked right along with it.” Now the nurse was gone but the television remained. Even though she felt obliged to apologize for its presence, she did not in truth dislike the programs as much as she pretended. The set was going from morning to night.
The program that she claimed as her favorite was a comedy show, That Was the Week That Was. Her real favorites, however, were soap operas. Afternoon visitors were obliged to watch them with her or to hear about the latest episode of As the World Turns. Or, if she was not reporting on the soaps, it was the latest gossip about women like Barbara Paley, the “silly” jet-setters whose activities she followed.
Shallow conversation was hardly what people expected from Dorothy. Some of her friends found it extremely disconcerting. They had difficulty understanding that the hours crawled by, and soap operas helped pass the afternoons, until it was twilight and a waiter knocked on her door with the daily menu. An hour later, he reappeared bearing a tray. Even if she sent it back more or less untouched, it filled the void until she could settle down to Scotch and plotting the evening TV lineup. As she had written, if you can get through the twilight in New York, you’ll survive the night.
On the evening of her seventy-second birthday, she was invited to Sid and Laura Perelman’s Village apartment. While she enjoyed the celebration, her style was cramped because her doctor had grown increasingly tiresome about liquor, and she had meekly pledged not to touch a drop. Holding a glass of soda made her feel foolish.
“Do you know what this is?” she said to Heywood Hale Broun as she held up the glass with undisguised disgust. “Ginger ale. Isn’t that awful?”
She understood that drinking had become dangerous because it increased the risk of falls. She could afford no more of them. Her periodic resolutions to go on the wagon were always short-lived. On more than one occasion, expected at a friend’s house for dinner, she nipped into the Carlyle bar to fortify herself and forgot to come out. Several times she went too far with Scotch and found herself in Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital. Whenever visitors appeared, she politely offered them a drink, then guessed she would pour one for herself.
But one led to many. Parker Ladd believed that if he helped her empty a bottle, that would be the end of it, and she would be forced to stop for the day. One night shortly before Christmas 1965, he prepared highball after highball for them, swallowing a little of his own and dumping the rest down the sink. Finally he heaved a sigh of relief to find the bottle empty. To his amazement, Dorothy hauled herself up and began rummaging around on the closet floor among some old shoes. In triumph, she produced another bottle of Scotch. That year she spent the holiday in the hospital.
Increasingly, Dorothy’s drinking upset her friends. Ruth Goetz discovered that even an hour’s visit was “heavy going” and found herself feeling relieved when it was time to leave. Lillian Hellman only appeared when she was summoned in times of crisis, and she fled once the emergency was over. Dorothy’s alcoholism made her “dull and repetitive,” she wrote, and in any case she was unable to assume “the burdens that Dottie, maybe by never asking for anything, always put on her friends.” Dorothy pretended not to notice Hellman’s neglect. On those rare occasions when Hellman did visit, she greeted her with, “Oh, Lilly, come in quick. I want to laugh again,” instead of the reproaches Lillian was expecting. When Dorothy was on a binge, she sometimes instructed the hotel switchboard to take her calls, but more often the drinking was unpremeditated and she forgot. When Joseph Bryan telephoned to inquire how she was doing, she sounded friendly and then all at once, for no apparent reason, began to curse him as “a no-good, fascist son of a bitch.”
The world seemed to be shrinking. Few new people entered her life and the political friends she once had called “my own people” had quietly dropped from sight. Some of them would have agreed with Hellman when she later wrote that Dorothy’s eccentricities, once so amusing, had become “too strange for safety or comfort.” Dorothy tried to accept their being dead or busy or living some new incarnation. Still remaining were the Mostels and the Perelmans, whose company she continued to enjoy. The fall she returned to New York, she was greatly saddened to learn of Gerald Murphy’s death and sent Sara a telegram that simply read, DEAREST SARA, DEAREST SARA. Although Sara spent her summers at East Hampton, she kept a city apartment for the winters and now lived at the Volney with a nurse. While Dorothy saw Sara often and permitted expressions of motherly concern over her health and appetite, her closest companion continued to be Bea Stewart, who had never figured among “my own people,” who cared not two cents for politics, but who had permitted Dorothy to lean on her whenever she liked for some forty years. Bea, unlike the others, never pulled a face when Dorothy reached for the Scotch.
Around close friends she did not trouble to conceal the black moods that sometimes enveloped her, times when she needed to sound off about her many afflictions and privations. She complained to Wyatt Cooper about how she really deserved to be dead because “everybody I ever cared about is dead.” An afternoon with Fred Shroyer provoked a similar litany of small frustrations and major disasters. As he was leaving, she kissed him goodbye and whispered theatrically, “Listen, Fred, don’t feel badly when I die, because I’ve been dead for a long time.” He left feeling totally sorry for her. That bit of gallows humor was wicked of her, but she had few pleasures left in life.
In the early months of 1967, her situation looked bright. At last it seemed as if Leah Salisbury’s years of work were going to pay off in a Broadway production. Marcella Cisney, who with her husband operated a theater company at the University of Michigan, had organized a script based on Dorothy’s poems and stories as well as more recent writings from The New Yorker and. Cisney was a respected director who had conceived a similar production based on the poetry and letters of Robert Frost, a production that had been tried out at Michigan before its New York opening. Her production proposal for A Dorothy Parker Portfolio included Cole Porter’s music, sets based on the sketches of New Yorker artists such as Peter Arno and William Steig, and a cast starring Julie Harris and backed up by such versatile performers as Tom Ewell and Anne Jackson.
In Salisbury’s judgment, Cisney’s idea was worth pursuing and encouraging. When she brought her to the Volney to read the script, Dorothy could not have been more “delighted” and gave the project her enthusiastic endorsement. She particularly liked the thought of Julie Harris as her prototype. As the months passed and the details were worked out, Dorothy’s excitement mounted. Cisney planned to open the show at Ann Arbor’s 1967—1968 season, give Dorothy one thousand dollars in advance royalties, and then negotiate a Dramatists Guild contract for a Broadway production. In the meantime, she asked Dorothy to attend rehearsals in Ann Arbor and offer suggestions.
The prospect of a Broadway show buoyed her spirits. She also hoped that it might alleviate her money worries. Lately she had been thinking about the future, wondering how she was going to conserve her nest egg. The result of her stewing was a decision to move to a smaller, cheaper apartment on the sixth floor. This meant a savings of twenty-five dollars a month, but having made the switch she immediately regretted it. The new apartment was not nearly as pleasant as 8E.
For a while that winter she went out frequently. Friends took her to see Sherry, a Broadway musical based on The Man Who Came to Dinner. Afterward, they went to the Oak Room at the Plaza, where she held court and was delighted to be spotted by Broadway columnist Leonard Lyons. That sort of adventure happened rarely. More often she spent quiet times with Sara Murphy or evenings at Bea Stewart’s apartment six blocks away. A color snapshot taken by Bea showed that Dorothy liked to dress up for these outings. She wore a smart navy blue dress, and her hair and makeup had been obviously done with care. As always, her poodle was seated on her lap. Evenings at Bea’s customarily ended with Dorothy’s opening her purse and making a woebegone face. She had no change for a cab. The ritual would end with her accepting a dollar or two.
Even though she felt energetic, she continued to grumble about her terrible life. She was as good as dead. “I can’t write, I can’t write,” she would moan. When it was proposed that she might want to reminisce about her life by dictating the story to Wyatt Cooper, she surprised everyone by agreeing. It would give her, she said, “something to live for,” and she assured Cooper she would keep the narrative “gay”; otherwise there would be no point in telling it. The tapings were, in fact, somewhat of a strain. After three sessions, they gave up the project. Possibly Dorothy found them fun because she had an opportunity to demolish her father and practically every other human being whose path had crossed hers, but Cooper derived little satisfaction. Unable to accept her stories as the truth, he concluded that the recollections had to be “creative exaggerations.”
In March, Gloria and Wyatt Cooper gave a party in her honor. This resulted from her having missed an earlier invitation, when a blizzard had dumped a foot of snow on the city and she had been unable to navigate the storm. Aware of her disappointment, the Coopers proposed a special party for her and promised to invite glamorous, interesting people whose company she would enjoy.
“My wife,” wrote Cooper, “was, of course, fascinated by Dottie, and somewhat worshipful, an attitude that was mutual.... Dottie was always at her most genteel in my wife’s presence, with malice toward none and charity for all.” It was true that her manner toward Gloria Vanderbilt could not have been more conventionally correct, as it would have been with any of the socialites whose lives she followed in Women’s Wear Daily and ripped to shreds with such relish. Gloria’s rather imperious manner made her smile. She had taken to calling her “Gloria the Vth.”
In the following weeks, invitations were extended to a dozen couples, including Mr. and Mrs. William Paley, Mr. and Mrs. Louis Auchincloss, Mr. and Mrs. Gardner Cowles, and Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Peabody, among other notables. None of Dorothy’s friends were asked.
“Have you been invited?” Dorothy demanded of Parker Ladd, who happened to be a friend of both hers and the Coopers.
“No,” he answered, he had not.
“Well, I’m not going either,” she swore. “Those are just not my kind of people.”
In reality, nothing could have prevented her acceptance. What troubled her was having nothing to wear, at least nothing worthy of such a fine occasion. When the Coopers realized this, they quickly provided a suitable costume. Gloria Vanderbilt sent over a size-three gold-brocade caftan beaded with tiny pearls. Dorothy found it enchanting. Even though the dress was six inches too long, she refused to have it shortened, because she thought it made her look like a Chinese empress. A last-minute crisis, the realization that she lacked matching shoes and handbag, was averted by Sara Murphy, who escorted her to Lord & Taylor to purchase accessories and then treated her to tea at Schrafft’s, a favor that did not prevent Dorothy from complaining afterward about the department store, Sara’s taste in restaurants, and the nurse who accompanied Sara everywhere.
At the Coopers, seated between Wyatt and Louis Auchincloss, Dorothy had to admit that Gloria Vanderbilt certainly knew how to give a dinner party. The display of flowers, the red tablecloths, and silver gleaming under the candlelight looked splendid. Everyone was dressed to the teeth. Dorothy studied the details of gowns, jewels, and coiffures, the better to savor and recall later for curious friends. Although she performed her part with grace and dignity, from time to time her inhibitions loosened and she let slip an unexpected remark. When another guest delivered an accolade on the beauty of the wine goblets, pointing out that wine always tasted so much better in lovely glasses, Dorothy was quick to agree.
“Oh, yes,” she fluted, “paper cups aren’t right.” It was at this moment that Wyatt Cooper, who had been finding it difficult to converse with her under these formal circumstances, was suddenly seized by an attack of nervous coughing.
On her other side, Louis Auchincloss was having a frustrating evening, because the noise at the table drowned out Dorothy’s soft voice. “I could not hear a word she said. I have never been more sadly disappointed in a social occasion in my life. I admired her so much and we could not communicate!”
To Dorothy there was little real communication with anyone at the dinner—the percussion of all that invisible money was deafening. In the days after the fete, she expressed her disdain for the whole business by verbally garrotting practically everyone present.
Bea Stewart’s telephone rang in the late afternoon on Wednesday, June 7. “She’s gone,” announced a desk clerk calling from the Volney.
Stewart took this to mean that Dorothy changed her mind about apartment 6F and impulsively moved elsewhere. But it was not that at all. Mrs. Parker died that afternoon, he informed her. A chambermaid discovered the body.
Stewart was astounded. The previous week Dorothy seemed tired, although not so tired that she stopped enjoying Scotch or Chesterfields. When Bea stopped by, she found Dorothy sitting up in bed and thought that all she needed was a rest. Never had she suspected the end was approaching.
She called the Volney back and asked them to enter Dorothy’s apartment and remove the dog. Dorothy would not want the police to impound Troy. When Stewart arrived at the hotel, the poodle was safely stored in another apartment, and the authorities were present on the scene. Dorothy lay in bed under a sheet. When Lillian Hellman arrived a short while later, she answered the medical examiner’s questions and called the newspapers—the cause of death had been a heart attack. By this time, Stewart was on her way home with Troy.
In Atlanta, Martin Luther King, Jr., was in Beaumon’s Restaurant, where his Southern Christian Leadership Conference was meeting in an executive session, when he was called to the telephone. A few minutes later he made his way back to the table and announced that Dorothy Parker had bequeathed her estate to him, “which verifies what I have always said, that the Lord will provide.” He was surprised because he had never met her. Afterward, he issued a formal statement saying that although she needed no monument to her memory, “this fine deed” could only add to her reputation. After deduction of expenses, the Parker estate amounted to $20,448.39.
On Thursday evening, at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in New York, Kate Mostel kept vigil with the body, which was laid out in the beaded caftan Dorothy had worn to the Vanderbilt-Cooper party. Mostel, raised a Catholic, thought it was awful to leave a person’s body alone in a funeral parlor. The only other person present was George Oppenheimer. They sat in silence.
Lillian Hellman took charge of the funeral arrangements with her usual efficiency. On Friday morning, a day of brilliant sunshine, there was a memorial service at Frank Campbell’s. In her will, Dorothy had requested no service of any kind, but Hellman believed in observing the amenities. In any case, it was going to be a very brief service. Among the one hundred and fifty friends who showed up to pay their respects were a number who expressed astonishment over the size of the obituary that had appeared in The New York Times. The story had begun on the front page and continued inside for almost an entire page. The paper also carried a sampling of quotes to demonstrate her “saucy wit,” some of which witticisms she had written or spoken and some of which she had not.
After a violinist played Bach’s “Air on a G String,” Lillian Hellman and Zero Mostel came forward to deliver eulogies. Kate Mostel recalled that Hellman told Zero, “ ‘You take five minutes and I’ll take five.’ So Zero took five minutes and she took twenty.” Zero Mostel tactfully pointed out that the last thing Dorothy would have wanted was this formal ceremony. “If she had her way,” he said, “I suspect she would not be here at all.” After the mourners had filed out, Sid Perelman remarked, “I’m sure Dorothy’s foot was tapping even through as short an exercise as that because she had a very short fuse.”
Many times she had rehearsed her death, imagining even the kind of weather she wanted:
Oh, let it be a night of lyric rain
And singing breezes, when my bell is tolled.
I have so loved the rain that I would hold
Last in my ears its friendly, dim refrain.
When she had written those lines she had been thirty and thinking of her mother’s death, that terrifying journey across the harbor with the coffin and standing around the muddy mound at Woodlawn. On the afternoon her own life closed it was fair and warm, with temperatures in the mid-eighties. She had never been able to get what she wanted.
In Rochester, Bill Droste and Lel Iveson read of their aunt’s death in the newspaper. Even though they had not heard from her in many years—not, in fact, since their mother died—they wished to acknowledge her passing, out of respect.
On June 9, 1967, Dorothy was cremated at Ferncliff Crematory in Harts-dale, New York. During the following weeks, her ashes remained unclaimed. Lillian Hellman, who made the arrangements, had left no instructions about their disposition. On July 16, 1973, Ferncliff finally received word to mail the cremated remains to the legal firm of O’Dwyer and Bernstien, 99 Wall Street, New York City.
Oscar Bernstien and Paul O‘Dwyer frankly did not know what to do with Dorothy’s ashes. Pending further instructions from Lillian Hellman, Paul O’Dwyer stored the box in the drawer of a filing cabinet in his office. In 1988, the NAACP claimed the ashes, which were transferred to a specially designed memorial garden on the grounds of its Baltimore headquarters.
Upon Dorothy’s death, the disposition of her business affairs and her personal effects fell to her executor. Since the only business deal in progress during the last months of Dorothy’s life was Marcella Cisney’s A Dorothy Parker Portfolio, Leah Salisbury wasted no time in writing to Lillan Hellman about it. To her surprise, Hellman was unwilling to extend the necessary approval. Despite appeals from both Salisbury and Cisney asking her to reconsider, Hellman steadfastly opposed the project until Cisney was obliged to drop the matter in 1970. Hellman’s attitude toward her guardian-ship of Dorothy’s and Dashiell Hammett’s estates was essentially negative. As one of her biographers later noted, she did not encourage those “who would like to keep books on Hammett and Parker, whose literary papers she keeps safely out of sight.” She refused to cooperate with anyone who wished to write about Dorothy.
In 1972, over Hellman’s fierce protests, the executorship of Dorothy’s estate passed to the NAACP. Ownership of the Parker literary property belonged to Martin Luther King during his lifetime. After his death in 1968, it was the NAACP’s position that their absolute ownership made an executor unnecessary. A court ruling in their favor terminated Hellman’s fiduciary capacity, which she had assumed was for life. She was not pleased. “It’s one thing to have real feeling for black people,” she said, “but to have the kind of blind sentimentality about the NAACP, a group so conservative that even many blacks now don’t have any respect for, is something else. She must have been drunk when she did it.”
To playwright Howard Teichmann, Hellman angrily called Dorothy “that goddamn bitch.” Hellman claimed that she had “paid her hotel bill at the Volney for years, kept her in booze, paid for her suicide attempts—all on the promise that when she died, she would leave me the rights to her writing. At my death, they would pass to the NAACP. But what did she do? She left them directly to the NAACP. Damn her!”
Hellman arranged for her secretary to be paid fifty dollars from the estate to clean Dorothy’s apartment. According to Hellman’s memoirs, “Among the small amount of papers she left were odds and ends of paid or unpaid laundry bills, a certificate of the aristocratic origins of a beloved poodle, a letter dated ten years before from an admirer of her poems, and the letter from me sent from Russia about six weeks before she died. [In fact, the only unpaid bills were from the Volney, Dorothy’s doctor, the Zitomer Pharmacy, and a newspaper delivery service, debts amounting to less than five hundred dollars.] Around the envelope of my letter was folded a piece of paper that was the beginning, obviously, of a letter Dottie never finished. It said, ‘Come home soon, Lilly, and bring Natasha on a leash. She’d be such a nice companion for C’Est Tout [Troy]. I—’ ”
The few personal papers, documents, or mementos that she left behind were to vanish, destroyed either when the apartment was cleaned or at some later date. As Martha Gellhorn wrote in 1981, Dorothy “might as well have left her papers to Fort Knox. Until Miss H. releases Mrs. Parker’s papers, there is no way to prove how long Miss H. stayed in Spain [during 1937].”
Nothing was released. After Lillian Hellman’s death in 1984, no material relating to Dorothy was found among her possessions.
Dorothy outlived nearly all the Round Tablers except Marc Connelly and Frank Sullivan. A few days after her death, Sullivan wrote to a friend,
I could write you so much about Dotty that I don’t dare get started. Jim Cagney telephoned today from Milbrook in a mild state of shock about her death. He said he just wanted to make sure I was here, as a link with former and happier days. Well, it threw me into a pensive shock too. Her departure is as much the end of an era for me ... as the departure of the bulk of the NY papers. She was a strong person, Honey. And you said it, when you wrote: she was at war with herself all her life. Maybe most of us are and some negotiate cease fires occasionally, which seldom last. All the digs she took at people, friend and foe alike, were really digs at herself....
If there is any meaning to anything, she is now having the good time she seldom had while here, and I hope she is having it with Mr. Benchley (her name for him always).