Chapter 4
1919
In the summer of 1919, New York teemed with returning veterans who were taking up jobs they had left or just beginning careers deferred by the war. Among the newcomers determined to make his mark in the literary marketplace was twenty-four-year old Edmund “Bunny” Wilson. He had postulated for himself a twofold strategy for success: get something in print and, if possible, get it in Vanity Fair. Around this time, Dorothy had been given the additional duty of reading manuscript submissions, stacks of them. Previously the processing of unsolicited manuscripts had been done by Albert Lee, whose system of elimination had been swift and efficient: He attached rejection slips and returned them unread to their authors. Dorothy felt obliged to read the pieces before rejecting them. From time to time, she came across writing that showed promise. When Wilson submitted some prose he had written for the Nassau Literary Review while an undergraduate at Princeton, she brought it to Crowninshield’s attention. He invited Wilson to come in for a talk.
Wilson, nicknamed “Bunny” in the nursery by his mother, had curly red hair that was already thinning. He sought acceptance for his writing but was particularly needy in other respects. Having only recently worked up the courage to purchase his first condom in a Greenwich Village drugstore, he looked forward to remedying his lack of sexual experience. When he met Dorothy at Vanity Fair, there may have been more than one idea on his mind. As they shook hands, he shyly looked her over. Even though she was Mrs. Parker, she must have impressed him as a woman who might possibly be available. Despite his attraction, he felt put off—so he would claim—by what seemed to him an excessive use of perfume. A demon with an atomizer in her hands, Dorothy had a lifelong habit of spraying her head and shoulders with clouds of scent. It made her feel feminine and secure. Friends of hers remember that she always smelled delicious, but Wilson was clearly overwhelmed by the fragrance. “Although she was fairly pretty and although I needed a girl, what I considered the vulgarity of her too much perfume prevented me from paying her court.” Having hit upon a plausible excuse for rejecting Dorothy, before she could reject him, he went on to complain that “the hand with which I had shaken hers kept the scent of her perfume all day,” but evidently he was not sufficiently distressed to think of washing his hands.
The randy Bunny Wilson was not the only one to find Mrs. Parker attractive—and not the first to find her intimidating either. Her appearance without a male escort at first-nights and her pugnacious literary style gave people the impression she might be approachable, although any man who tried found himself face to face with the old-fashioned manners of a Victorian matron. Dorothy was too much the war bride ever to consider infidelity. The notion of sleeping with other men revolted her almost as much as the thought that Eddie might be seeking the bed of some German woman.
During the months while she was waiting for him to come home, changes were taking place at Vanity Fair. All winter Crowninshield had talked about offering the managing editorship to Robert Benchley, a writer who had been contributing humorous pieces for nearly five years, but nothing had come of the idea. Benchley, who had spent the war writing publicity for sales of war bonds as well as free-lancing, was now growing impatient. When a friend resigned as associate editor of Collier’s, Benchley had a chance for the job. He used this as a lever to force a decision from Vanity Fair. Publisher Condé Nast decided to interview him. He told Benchley that the magazine definitely required changes. In his opinion, it needed to be upgraded with serious articles.
Benchley, realizing this was his big chance, agreed that more serious pieces seemed a sensible change. He was hired at one hundred dollars a week.
When Dorothy came to work on Monday, May 19, she found Benchley sharing her office, already hard at work. Somebody had placed a welcoming bowl of roses on his desk. With considerable formality, he addressed her as “Mrs. Parker,” and she naturally responded by calling him “Mr. Benchley.” At noon, Crowninshield invited him to the Coffee House, his luncheon club, which excluded women. For the remainder of the day Benchley was absorbed in writing an article. A few minutes after five, he set out for Grand Central Station to catch the 5:37 train for suburban Crestwood, New York.
Robert Charles Benchley was not at all the sort of person Dorothy had been expecting. He looked like a prudish, domesticated, twenty-nine-year-old Boy Scout who played mandolin duets with his wife, went to bed at ten, and spent Sundays clipping his hedges. Such was the case.
He was five feet ten and a half inches tall, slender with thinning sandy hair, blue eyes, and a pale face. His serviceable suits came off the racks at Rogers Peet. Since he believed strongly in taking care of his health, he wore long woolen underwear and galoshes. He suffered from hay fever in season and had a nervous habit of biting his fingernails all year round. He neither smoked, drank, nor swore, and never had he been unfaithful to his wife.
Benchley came from a family of middle-class, small-town New En-glanders who had settled in Worcester, Massachusetts, before the Revolution. Although one of his ancestors became a lieutenant governor of the state in the 1850s, none of the Benchleys had been particularly gifted at making money. Robert Benchley’s father never got beyond clerking for the city’s mayor, a position he held for thirty years. Charlie Benchley’s lack of ambition was most likely related to his fondness for drink, an addiction that took ingenuity to indulge because his wife, Jennie, personally collected his paycheck and doled out his carfare without an extra cent. Of her two children, Jennie Benchley preferred her older son, Edmund. Robert, thirteen years younger, idolized Edmund too. When Robert was eight, Edmund was killed in the Spanish-American War. Told of her son’s death, Jennie blurted out, “Oh, why couldn’t it have been Robert?”
To atone for those words, Jennie treated her remaining child like a prince. She even tied his shoelaces for him until he entered high school. To avenge himself on his mother, Benchley waged passive war on the female sex for the rest of his life.
If the flora and fauna of Benchley’s homeland had been alcoholism and rejection, he grew up seemingly untouched by misfortunes of any kind. During his adolescence, a wealthy woman who claimed to have been his brother’s secret fiancée offered to pay for his education at Phillips Exeter Academy, followed by four years at Harvard. In college, where he became one of the best-liked students on campus, Benchley was editor of the Harvard Lampoon and a star of the Hasty Pudding shows. Two years after he graduated, in the class of 1912, he married Gertrude Darling, a Worcester girl whom he had known since elementary school. By the time he arrived at Vanity Fair, he seemed to be a well-adjusted family man with his personality and his life set as if in concrete. Though the couple had a small son and Gertrude was pregnant again, Benchley had yet to earn enough to support his family. He still entered the purchase of each newspaper and every postage stamp in his pocket expense book.
It was a mystery to Dorothy why Crowninshield had selected Benchley to be managing editor and how—or even if—he had written all the loony pieces that had been appearing regularly in the magazine. On the basis of his writing, she had imagined him to have a delicious sense of the absurd, some rare and extravagant madness that she described as “a leaping of the mind,” and that others would describe as “almost-logic, the same chilly, fascinating little skid off the hard road and right up to the edge of the swamp.” Yet on first meeting her new colleague, Benchley’s lunacy was not obvious to Dorothy.
Several days passed. Just as she was growing accustomed to sharing her office with the methodical Mr. Benchley, Crowninshield brought in another new employee and assigned him a third desk in the room. Never before had Dorothy laid eyes on anyone quite like this individual. He was a giant—six foot seven inches, stooped, rail-thin, with cavernous brown eyes and a nailbrush mustache. Robert Sherwood, a twenty-three-year-old veteran who had served in the Canadian Black Watch and had been gassed and wounded, was plainly ill because he filled the office with his gasps as he struggled for breath. Communication was difficult because he refused to speak. When a stenographer came in to take dictation from him, he sat on the floor and turned his back on the woman.
Nobody knew what Sherwood was supposed to do. Applying for the job, he had appeared in his Black Watch uniform, and Crownie, no doubt impressed by the kilt, had hired him for a three-month trial period at a salary that was only five dollars more than the secretaries were earning. He gave him the vague title of drama editor, but told Benchley that he was to be picture editor. Eventually Sherwood decided that his real job was to be “a sort of maid of all work.”
He made Dorothy and Benchley so uncomfortable that before long they began lunching together just to discuss the problem. She put forth the theory that Sherwood was a “Conversation Stopper” and that, in her experience, trying to talk to a “Stopper” was like “riding on the Long Island railroad—it gets you nowhere in particular.” She also thought he looked tough and sinister. Benchley wondered how Crowninshield could have saddled him with a freak whose military exploits even remained a mystery. With so much of Sherwood to shoot at, how could the Germans have managed to hit him in both legs? He suspected that Sherwood must have been lying on his back, waving his feet in the air. The truth about Robert Sherwood did not occur to either of them. He was merely struck dumb in their presence.
Several days later, as Dorothy and Benchley were leaving for lunch, they were surprised to find Sherwood waiting for them outside the building. Hesitant, he asked whether they would mind if he walked down West Forty-fourth Street with them—not with them actually but between them—for he was in need of protection. “In those days,” Dorothy recalled, “the Hippodrome, a block from the office, had engaged a troupe of midgets and Mr. Sherwood ... wouldn’t go down the street unless Mr. Benchley walked on one side of him and I on the other, because, with his six feet 7 inches, he was afraid the midgets might tease him if he were alone.” Looking like an ambulatory pipe organ, the editors set off down the street, but the midgets ran squeaking alongside yelling “Hey, Legs!,” warning him to duck when he crossed under the Sixth Avenue El, and demanded to know how the weather was up there. At Sixth Avenue, having outrun “the nasty little things,” Dorothy and Benchley felt obliged to invite Sherwood to join them for lunch, and the ice was finally broken.
Back at the office, Dorothy whispered to Benchley that she was having second thoughts. Sherwood was “nice.” Benchley agreed that he was “one of the nicest guys I ever saw.” After that things began to change.
Upon closer acquaintance, Dorothy discovered that Sherry was “pretty fast.” He wore his straw hat at a rakish angle, tried to make dates with the receptionist, and admitted to lifting a few in Broadway cabarets. One day when he acknowledged having a hangover, Benchley expressed alarm and disapproval. Dorothy sprang to Sherwood’s defense, declaring that she had once attended a cocktail party.
Benchley was doubly shocked. “Mark my words,” he warned her, “alcohol will coarsen you.”
Dorothy could see nothing wrong with drinking an occasional cocktail.
Colored photographs of corpses appeared on the walls at Vanity Fair. While the atmosphere at the magazine had always been lively, now it was becoming downright rowdy. At first Crowninshield was pleased to note that his three editors had taken “an enormous shine to one another.” What he failed to understand was how much clowning was actually taking place. After Benchley told Dorothy about his enjoyment of two undertaking magazines, The Casket and Sunnyside, she decided to become a subscriber. Whenever a new issue arrived in the mail, the two of them stopped working to admire the pictures of cadavers, then they read aloud the humor column, “From Grave to Gay,” and howled with laughter.
Dorothy found the magazines hilarious. “I cut out a picture out of one of them, in color, of how and where to inject the embalming fluid, and had it hung over my desk.” But in Crowninshield’s memory, there was not one but an entire row of brightly colored anatomical plates above her desk, and he asked her to remove them. “I dared suggest that they might prove a little startling to our occasional visitors, and that, perhaps, something by Marie Laurencin might do as well.” Dorothy responded to his suggestion with “the most palpable contempt.”
Already Crownie’s la-dee-dah mannerisms were beginning to grate on Benchley’s New England nerves, but Dorothy said that she felt sorry for Crownie. He was “a lovely man, but puzzled,” and she had to admit that “we behaved extremely badly.”
After several weeks of this, Crowninshield privately began to think of the magazine as a lions’ den with himself in the uncomfortable position of tamer. No doubt his editors were still cubs, “amazing whelps” he called them, whose teeth were not yet sharp and whose claws had not grown long, but they seemed to be animals nonetheless. Later on he described their antics more benignly: “Indeed I believe that in no period of their lives did the three find more enjoyment, make more friends, or work as hard, or as easily.” In the early summer of 1919, the problem was that the cubs weren’t working particularly hard and sometimes they weren’t working at all. They were expected in the office at eight-thirty but often showed up late, then spent the mornings in enthusiastic personal conversations, took long lunch hours at Child’s, and went home early. Whenever it was necessary for Sherwood to leave the office, even though the midgets had left town, he would say, “Walk down the street with me,” and all three would nip out for some air. Dorothy remembered that “Mr. Benchley and I would leave our jobs and guide him down the street. I can’t tell you, we had more fun.”
Condé Nast was far from entertained. He instructed the business manager to enforce the company’s tardy rule with a memo warning that latecomers would be required to fill out a slip explaining why they were late. Benchley was the first to receive one. His reply, hundreds of words in tiny handwriting covering a slip of paper the size of a playing card, unfolded a sorrowful tale of how he had arrived early, heard that the Hippodrome’s elephants had got loose, offered to round them up, chased them up to Seventy-second Street and down West End Avenue to the Hudson River docks where they were trying to board the boats of the Fall River Line, and finally herded them back to the Hippodrome, thereby averting a major marine disaster but unfortunately causing him to be eleven minutes late for work.
This was his first and last tardy slip, but the battle lines had been silently drawn up, with the whelps on one side, Condé Nast on the other, and a nervous Crowninshield in the middle.
At the end of June, Nast and Crowninshield departed for a two-month trip abroad and left Benchley in charge of publishing two issues of the magazine with the assistance of Dorothy and Sherwood. What made Nast imagine this would be a sensible plan is hard to fathom. On the day of sailing the editors appeared at the Aquitania with a floral horseshoe, the tackiest one they had been able to buy, and offered exuberant bon voyage wishes to their bosses. Liberated, they trooped back to the office and immediately began to go haywire. Naturally they kept hours that suited them. They also took steps to upgrade Sherwood’s position and salary. Unable to authorize a raise, Benchley did the next best thing and assigned him several articles to write. The first piece he turned in was a piece of juvenalia better suited to a college humor magazine than the country’s most sophisticated monthly, but Benchley purchased it for seventy-five dollars, a higher price than some well-known contributors were getting. When the editor of the men’s fashion department went on vacation leaving a half-finished column, Sherwood completed it with predictions that best-dressed men would soon be wearing waistcoats trimmed with cut jade and peg-topped trousers. This cracked Benchley up, and he and Dorothy sent it off to the printer. Nobody, they assured each other, ever read the stupid column anyway.
In June, Dorothy received an invitation to attend a luncheon at the Algonquin Hotel, a party hosted by two theatrical press agents to welcome Alexander Woollcott, The New York Times’s drama critic, back from the war.
Woollcott was a fat, bespectacled man of thirty-two whose smallish features tended to sink like raisins into a pudding of jowls and double chins. A master of the insult, he already had acquired a considerable reputation for bitchiness. It was said that entering into conversation with him was like petting an overfed Persian cat who had just sharpened its claws. Those who found his personality uncomfortable dismissed him as a one-man freak show, but to his intimate friends—and in time they would be a cult numbering in the hundreds and ranging from Eleanor Roosevelt to the Marx brothers—he was an acquired taste. They would vie with each other to find the right words to describe his personality: “Old Vitriol and Violets,” James Thurber dubbed him; Louisa M. Woollcott, said Howard Dietz; a New Jersey Nero in a pinafore, according to Edna Ferber. George Jean Nathan called him “the Seidlitz powder of Times Square” but the only epithet to capture the whole man was George Kaufman’s one-word label, “Improbable.”
A native of Red Bank, New Jersey, he was the maternal grandson of a founder of the Phalanx, a Fourieristic commune that was a lesser known but more successful counterpart of Brook Farm: Owing to his father’s frequent absences, Woollcott grew up in genteel poverty among his mother’s people at the Phalanx. After graduating in 1909 from Hamilton College, he worked briefly as a teller with the Chemical National Bank of New York while trying to obtain a reporter’s job on The New York Times. His literary style leaned heavily on the side of lavender and old lace, but he successfully resisted all impulses to improve it. If not one of the worst writers in America, he surely ranked among the top ten. Even his friends made fun of his style and were genuinely surprised to realize just how atrocious it actually was. (Even more surprising was the amount of money he earned by it.) In 1912, the Times appointed him drama critic, a position in which his taste for overripe adjectives seemed acceptable.
Still a virgin in his early twenties, a repressed, bewildered, presumably homosexual male who adored dressing in women’s clothing and fantasized becoming a mother, he must have been terrified at the thought of sex with either gender. When he developed mumps at twenty-two and his physician warned that the illness in adult men might affect potency, Woollcott apparently decided to use this as a convenient means of resolving the troubling issue of his sexuality. Thereafter he played the role of a “semi-eunuch” who was physically incapable of consummating the sex act. As a substitute for sex, he indulged himself by wearing scarlet-lined opera capes, insulting friends with greetings like “Hello, repulsive,” and eating enormously and exquisitely until his weight swung up to a blimpish 255 pounds.
Since Woollcott enlisted as a medical orderly as soon as war was declared, Dorothy had never encountered her colleague from the Times on opening nights. The hosts of the welcome-home luncheon, John Peter Toohey and Murdock Pemberton, sent her an invitation simply because she was Vanity Fair’s critic. They apparently did not think to invite Benchley and Sherwood. Dorothy, who went nowhere without them, insisted they accompany her to the Algonquin, where a long table had been decorated with American flags and a green felt banner that intentionally misspelled Woollcott’s last name.
Some thirty-five guests showed up, nearly all of them theatrical reporters, critics, and columnists from the daily papers, just the sort of people whom press agents might be expected to court. The most important journalist at the table was Franklin Pierce Adams, a mythical figure to Dorothy, who never missed reading The Conning Tower. Not only did he publish the type of verse she was laboring to write, but several times a week he ran a parody of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, recounting in mock Elizabethan English his flirtations, his frailties, the opening nights he attended, the books he read, and the celebrities he habitually met. To be mentioned in F.P.A.’s column was a distinction of the highest order.
Adams was a personal friend of Woollcott’s. In Paris they had served together on the staff of the American Expeditionary Force’s weekly newspaper, Stars and Stripes, as had another of the guests, former Private Harold Ross, the paper’s managing editor. Ross had developed a love-hate relationship with Woollcott, whom he thought of as “a fat duchess with the emotions of a fish.” On their first meeting, Ross viewed Sergeant Woollcott with suspicion when he had come strutting into the Stars and Stripes office.
“Where’d you work before?” Ross asked.
“The New York Times,” Woollcott pronounced in his most pompous voice. “Dramatic critic.”
Ross broke into raucous laughter. No real man would work at a sissy profession like drama critic.
“You know,” Woollcott said to him, “you remind me a great deal of my grandfather’s coachman.”
To this Ross would never be able to think of a suitable retort because there was none—he would always look as if he had tumbled off the train from Sauk Center. None of the Stars and Stripes writers would have won beauty prizes. F.P.A.’s beak nose and long, scraggly neck once led Irvin Cobb, seeing a stuffed moosehead, to exclaim, “My God, they’ve shot Frank Adams.” Harold Ross’s looks were pitiful. His hands, feet, ears, and mouth were too big, his gray eyes too small, a thicket of stiffish, mouse-colored bristles shot out of his scalp, and a large gap separated his two upper front teeth. When Ross once asked Woollcott for dental floss, Woollcott called out, “Never mind the floss, get him a hawser.”
A westerner from Colorado, a miner’s son who had dropped out of school at fourteen, Ross had bummed around the country working on a dozen newspapers before he enlisted. He had planned to return to the West Coast, charter a boat, and, like Jack London, take a restorative cruise to the South Seas, a project at once exotic and worthy of a real man. Definitely not among his plans was living in New York, which he considered a terrible place. While in Paris, Woollcott had introduced him to Jane Grant, a New York Timessociety reporter who had come over with the YMCA, and Ross had fallen in love. Now he lived in the Village and edited a new weekly magazine, The Home Sector, which was a stateside version of Stars and Stripes for veterans, and Jane Grant was back at the Times with a promotion to hotel news editor. They were engaged.
Another couple at Woollcott’s luncheon had already married and spent their honeymoon in France as war correspondents: Heywood Broun and Ruth Hale. Dorothy had met Broun one summer long ago at the shore. He was a distant memory of heat and sand, a Horace Mann student who was an acquaintance of her sister. She was pleased to see Broun and liked his wife, supposing them to be a modern couple successfully negotiating the shoals of marriage by having produced a child and still pursuing their separate interests.
Frank Adams, best man at their wedding, had called them “the clinging oak and the sturdy vine,” for Ruth was a militant feminist who had balked at the word obey in the Episcopal marriage service and threatened to call the wedding off. Tight-lipped when anyone addressed her as Mrs. Broun, she declared that she was not and never would be anyone but Ruth Hale. Her husband, a thirty-one-year-old Tribune columnist, was a large, anxious, slovenly man, who bore a physical resemblance to a laundry bag. His sense of fashion was certainly odd. In Paris, learning of General John Pershing’s decree that all war correspondents must wear uniforms, Broun outfitted himself at the Galeries Lafayette department store in what he believed to be appropriate attire: pink riding breeches, fedora, and raccoon coat. Pershing, noticing him at an inspection, disheveled and unlaundered with his puttees sagging about his ankles, stared in bewilderment before asking, “What happened? Did you fall down?” How Broun managed to survive a war is unclear. His phobias included trains, automobiles, and elevators. He was also a hypochondriac who took his own pulse to make sure he was still alive.
At the Algonquin, Dorothy remained silent, shyly blinking at everyone from under the brim of her Merry Widow hat, virginal, self-conscious, and extremely well turned out in one of her good suits so that she looked like a Park Avenue princess slumming. She could not decide whether or not she even liked Woollcott and his friends. A few months earlier she had written a scathing article about men whose war service had taken place far behind the front lines, scorning them as “the numerous heroes who nobly accepted commissions in those branches of the service where the fountain pen is mightier than the sword.” Finding herself in the company of “fountain-pen lancers” made her feel so uncomfortable that she usually clammed up and concealed “the fact that my husband went to the front—it made him seem like such a slacker.” Nobody at Woollcott’s party knew the article was hers because she had used a pseudonym, but nevertheless she felt biased against them.
In years to come efforts were made to resurrect what, if anything, of significance had taken place that day, who had said what and to whom, but by then nobody remembered much. The only certainty was that Aleck Woollcott had held center stage recounting his wartime adventures at length and that the others were good-natured about allowing him to spout off. All his stories began with “When I was in the theater of war...” and finally Arthur Samuels cut him short. “Aleck, if you ever were in the theater of war, it was in the last-row seat nearest the exit.” Despite the presence of three professional women, the climate of the luncheon was very much that of an old boys’ get-together where talk of war or money would have been inevitable in any case. For Woollcott and the other veterans, it had been the best of all possible wars, but now they were concerned about their futures. In the summer of 1919, a time of great expectations and endless possibilities, they all wanted to retrieve careers, make contacts, get their books published and plays produced, be rich and famous, rise like cream to the top of the New York bottle. Therefore, they had come prepared to listen to Woollcott’s bragging and laugh at everybody’s jokes, just as if they were at a Booster Club bash in Toledo. Besides, it was an ideal way to spend a June day when the weather was fine and nobody felt much like working in the first place.
“Why don’t we do this every day?” somebody said as the luncheon began to break up. Since it sounded like a good idea, a polite murmur of approval was heard.
Walking back to the office with Sherwood and Benchley, Dorothy did not seriously expect they would do it every day. For that matter, there seemed to be no good reason to do it ever again.
Shortly after Eddie’s return in August 1919, Robert Sherwood photographed the Parkers seated side by side on a park bench. Eddie is wearing a civilian suit and a lopsided smile. Dorothy looks haggard with her mouth set in a grim line. Their bodies are not touching.
The war had taken visible toll of her husband. His features had roughened, become puffy; the sweet, angular boyishness was missing and so was the playful energy she had found so appealing. Anxious to see his family (his sister had died in childbirth while he was overseas), he had gone to Hartford for a while. When he returned to New York, he was in no great hurry to resume his career. Although he seemed glad to be home, he also appeared subdued, indifferent, restless.
Since the fall theater season was just getting under way, there were many evenings when Dorothy had to work. She came home only long enough to change into dress clothes before going downtown again. She expected Eddie to accompany her. Sometimes he did, if the show happened to be a musical. Serious plays bored him. On Sundays they visited the Drostes, where he enjoyed playing with Helen’s children.
At first, when Dorothy came home from the office weary and eager to pour out her headaches, Eddie was quick to commiserate. She felt able to relax, even cry if she felt like it. Before long he greeted a long face with impatience, wondering why she was bawling again when there never was anything the matter. She explained that she enjoyed crying just for the sake of it, but this made no sense to him. If she was crying, he would slam out, returning hours later when they would make up in bed.
In time, his addiction to morphine could no longer be concealed. When he finally agreed to seek treatment, it turned out to be a more complicated process than she had expected. It meant, she recalled, probably exaggerating, “one sanatorium after another.” Although she managed as well as she could, her husband was a tortured man and living with him could be harrowing. It was rumored that on more than one occasion she returned home from Vanity Fair to find him stretched out on several chairs with his head in the oven of their gas stove.
The return of Nast and Crowninshield at the end of August put a noticeable crimp in the high spirits of the cub lions. To show their affection, they festooned Crownie’s office with streamers of crepe paper and hung a welcome-home sign. He was not pleased.
The next morning Dorothy arrived late, but Benchley breezed in even later because Gertrude had gone into labor and he had taken her to the hospital. After lunch, he failed to return to the office. Again the next day no work got done because Dorothy and Sherry were busy offering congratulations on the birth of Robert Charles Benchley, Jr., and listening to Benchley’s stories of his experiences at the hospital. Dorothy, possessive about him, did not like to be reminded that he had a second life in which she had no part. Not that she had any desire to be Gertrude Benchley, who was stuck in Crestwood with a little boy and a new baby while her husband was away all day in the city enjoying himself with women like herself. This was exactly the sort of marriage that had always terrified Dorothy. Curiously, her indignation was aroused not at the thought of Gertrude’s entrapment, but at the thought of Mr. Benchley’s, a perception of his marriage that he did nothing to discourage. What she couldn’t bring herself to wonder was why he had chosen it. Instead, she preferred seeing him as a helpless victim, either of circumstance or of Gertrude, most likely the latter. Although she had yet to meet Mrs. Benchley, she already had formed a picture of her as a frumpish, housecoated female who smelled of germicidal soap, looked for buttons to sew before they fell off, and slept in curlers.
That fall was a time of growing tension, as Dorothy tried to please one man at home and other men at the office. However hard she tried, she could not seem to succeed in either place. She failed to understand why Crowninshield fussed about copy deadlines since she worked harder and longer than he had any right to expect. If she was sometimes tardy, it was for good reason because she spent many evenings at the theater. Aside from her drama column, she did additional theater pieces as “Helen Wells,” contributed verse, composed captions for Fish’s drawings, read manuscripts, and helped with editing and proofreading. In her opinion, the Nast organization not only should have felt more appreciative, it also owed her a raise. When she asked for one, Crowninshield promised that he would speak to Nast after the first of the year.
The other cub lions felt equally dissatisfied. In unguarded moments, they grumbled about their wages so loudly that eventually somebody in the office reported their complaints to Condé Nast. Immediately a memo was circulated warning that discussion of salaries was against company policy and cause for discharge. No sooner had the memo reached their desks than the three of them retaliated with a memo of their own. They resented “being told what we may and what we may not discuss,” and they also protested against “the spirit of petty regulation” that had made possible such an edict in the first place. Then they lettered placards spelling out their salaries and took perverse pleasure in strolling through the office with the provocative signs swinging around their necks.
A flabbergasted Nast responded to their home-grown union by doing nothing. However, Crowninshield became seriously alarmed and entreated them not to exhaust the publisher’s patience.
Still boiling, but trying to keep a low profile around the office, they allowed themselves to blow out steam over lunch. From time to time, they ate at the nearby Algonquin, whose name they had familiarly shortened to “the Gonk.” After his party in the summer, Aleck Woollcott had continued to lunch there and nearly always invited friends to join him. Many of those who had attended his lunch had been dropped because he found them boring. Whenever the Vanity Fair editors came by, they were welcomed, as were two newspaper reporters, Marc Connelly and George Kaufman, who had not been present at the June gathering. Connelly, who wrote theater news for the Morning Telegraph, was a cheerful, bald man of twenty-nine and had the manner of a talkative leprechaun. Born across the river from Pittsburgh in McKeesport, he had been living in New York for three years, since his ambition was to become a playwright. Nightly, after his paper went to press, he strolled uptown with George Kaufman to discuss ideas they might transform into salable plays.
Kaufman, Woollcott’s assistant and a Times drama reporter, was a shy, nervous man who also came from Pittsburgh. He was a year older than Connelly, but aside from an interest in the theater, no two men could have been less similar. Kaufman’s demeanor breathed gloom: narrow face, glasses, a high pompadour of dark hair, and a long skinny body about which he felt so self-conscious that he refused to be seen in a bathing suit. His phobias were disabling, his hypochondria of textbook dimensions. He had a horror of being touched and after a single year of marriage was unable to have sex with his wife, Beatrice, although apparently he experienced fewer problems with prostitutes.
Before long, Woollcott was coming to the Algonquin regularly, and manager Frank Case began automatically reserving a table for him. Since the hotel was patronized by celebrities such as Mary Pickford and Booth Tarkington, it was understandable that Case would not be impressed by the Woollcott contingent. To him they were “just a crowd of unusually agreeable folk.” Plainly, “none of them had any money,” which no doubt was the reason he directed the waiter to leave complimentary popovers and celery and olives on their table. The group took on a mangy aura on those days when they were joined by Heywood Broun, who usually looked like a one-man slum. Once, outside the hotel, a sympathetic passerby handed him a dime.
Case was astute in his judgment about their financial status. The Vanity Fair editors filled up on popovers and ordered eggs, the cheapest entrée on the menu. They reserved their energy for vilifying Nast, whose bookkeeper mentality they found disgusting. As they all were aware, Nast’s obsession in life was sex, a commodity he pursued with greed and aggression. It evidently mattered little to him if the woman was call girl, manicurist, or socialite. They suspected that he was using Frank Crowninshield to sponsor his entry into New York high society, and still worse, using his connections to find women. Benchley’s horror of libertines and social climbers made him label Nast’s organization as the ultimate “whited sepulchre.” Sherwood was quick to point out that employees were “treated like serfs” and “paid that way, too,” but that Crownie was not to blame because he himself was handled like a poor relation.
To take their minds off Condé Nast, they began to talk about writing a play together, perhaps a musical. Searching for a story, they came up with the idea of a man who is bored with his witty, glamorous wife and who chooses instead to have an extramarital frolic with the least splashy woman imaginable, a mouse who wants to breed and keep house, the two types of women corresponding exactly to Dorothy and Gertrude Benchley. Having found a twist, they began trying to develop an outline. “All we have to do is write it,” Benchley recorded optimistically in his diary, next to a reminder that he was four hundred dollars in debt.
The day before Christmas, Crowninshield summoned Dorothy into his office for a private talk. He made clear to her that she should not expect a raise, for he was displeased with the quality of the magazine in general and her work in particular. Unemotional, officious, his meticulously pressed gray suit matching his silvering hair, Crownie’s usual gentle manner drained away in niggling complaints. Even though she assumed that he was voicing Nast’s objections, she felt thoroughly upset. She did not understand how her mentor, the man who had admired her outspokenness, could now be denigrating what he once had endorsed and promoted.
“Vanity Fair was a magazine of no opinion,” she later said, “but I had opinions.” She always remembered that day with great bitterness.