Chapter 5
1920-1921
On the second Sunday in January 1920, Crownie invited her to tea at the Plaza Hotel. Since it was a cold, snowy day, he asked the headwaiter to brighten up the table with roses. First, he told her that he admired her extravagantly and always would and that he would be honored to publish anything she might care to write. He was sure that she would be famous some day. Then he announced that Plum Wodehouse was returning to Vanity Fair, so that her services were no longer required, unfortunately.
Dorothy, meanwhile, had remained silent. She was waiting for him to bring up the names of Florenz Ziegfeld, David Belasco, and Charles Dillingham, three powerful producers who had recently trotted onto Broadway stages a flock of turkeys, to which Dorothy had speedily applied euthanasia. All three men, coincidentally advertisers in the magazine, had subsequently complained to Condé Nast. But Crownie was letting that matter pass. He was silent too about the angry phone call he had received from Billie Burke, the actress wife of Flo Ziegfeld who recently had appeared in Somerset Maugham’s comedy Caesar’s Wife. Dorothy’s review of the show had noted that Burke coyly threw herself around the stage as if giving an impersonation of exotic dancer Eva Tanguay. Burke had taken umbrage at that comment and very likely her husband had encouraged her to make a fuss. Crownie had wound up apologizing to Billie Burke.
Crowninshield’s gallantry in awkward situations was well known. His gentlemanly enthusiasm for discretion took precedence over truthfulness, and as a result, the real reason for Dorothy’s dismissal was left unstated. He then suggested that if she wanted to work on “little pieces at home,” they could work out a satisfactory rate.
Though Dorothy was livid, she did not press for further explanations. The only thing left for her to do was to reject his proposal and order the most costly dessert on the menu.
After leaving the Plaza, she steamed home to telephone Benchley, who came into the city on the next train. Dorothy, Eddie, and Benchley hashed over and over the events of recent weeks until late into the night. Robert Sherwood had been fired after being told that the woman who gave music lessons to Nast’s daughter would be taking over his duties. Dorothy’s dismissal seemed genuinely unfair and undeserved because she had praised many productions and many individual performers, including Billie Burke. The upshot of their discussion was that Benchley decided to quit and wrote his letter of resignation when he arrived at the office the next morning. He labeled the magazine’s action in Dorothy’s case as “incredibly stupid and insincere,” but apart from that, he added, his job wasn’t attractive enough to keep him there without Dorothy Parker and Robert Sherwood.
His resignation stunned Crowninshield. In his opinion, writers came a dime a dozen but a decent managing editor, which he considered Benchley, was hard to find. When he understood that Benchley was serious, he agreed to accept the resignation and predicted he would become famous some day, one of the treacly severance speeches so typical of the man. Later, Edmund Wilson overheard him remark that it was a pity Benchley had overreacted and that the way he had carried on about Mrs. Parker had been absurd.
Dorothy was deeply moved by Benchley’s allegiance, which she would call “the greatest act of friendship I’d known,” and unquestionably it was a generous action for a man with a wife and two children to support. There was something fiercely loyal in Benchley’s temperament, something beyond normal devotedness. This was not the first time he had left a job because a colleague was being mistreated. Benchley edited a Sunday rotogravure section for the Tribune in 1918. The paper’s managing editor was his friend and Harvard classmate Ernest Gruening, whom the Tribune suspected of being pro-German, perhaps because of his name or his pacifist leanings—a pacifism Benchley shared. When Gruening was fired without a chance to clear himself, Benchley resigned the same day. Whether or not Dorothy knew of this incident, she still would have regarded his resignation from Vanity Fair as a sign of special fidelity.
On that Monday nothing could subdue the exuberance of the cub lions. As they laughed and boasted and ranted about Condé Nast, even the prospect of unemployment appeared trivial. After a giddy lunch at the Algonquin, they strolled back to the office, where they began telephoning people they knew to advertise their availability. Still full of high spirits once the office closed, they ploughed through the snow-covered street to the Gonk, where they were joined by Aleck Woollcott and Gertrude Benchley, who had offered no objections to her husband’s decision. Over dinner, questioned by interested reporters who had heard rumors of a walkout at Vanity Fair, they began to discuss their plans for the future. Benchley thought that it would have been pleasant if they could have continued at Vanity Fair, “but it probably is better for all of us to do things for ourselves.” Why shouldn’t they become successful free-lancers who could write what they liked, instead of working for people like Condé Nast? There was no telling what they could do on their own. Now it might even be possible for Dorothy and Benchley to work on the play they had been talking about.
By midnight Monday, Dorothy had stopped worrying. Getting fired might be a mercy. The next morning, she was sure of it. The New York Times carried a news story, sympathetically worded by Woollcott, announcing her dismissal from Vanity Fair. It was the sort of invaluable publicity that the unemployed can’t buy. Attention to her plight continued. Before the week was out, she received a second plug when Frank Adams wrote in The Conning Tower: “R. Benchley tells me he hath resigned his position with ‘Vanity Fair’ because they had discharged Dorothy Parker; which I am sorry for.”
The trio went through the motions of working. In the lobby of the building, they hung a poster that asked people to make CONTRIBUTIONS FOR MISS BILLIE BURKE, though nobody did. They amused themselves by pinning red discharge chevrons on their sleeves and parading raffishly around the office. Dorothy was proud to recall that “we behaved very badly.”
Later that same week the manufacture, sales, and transportation of liquor was banned in the United States, thus marking the start of thirteen years of Prohibition. It was an historical event of no particular interest to Dorothy, who to be sociable would accept a gin daisy at a party but nurse it all evening. Benchley, an ardent prohibitionist, hailed the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment as “too good to be true” and insisted that the country was taking a “step toward Utopia.”
Since just about the only people remaining on Vanity Fair’s editorial staff were the secretaries, Crowninshield asked Edmund Wilson to read a few manuscripts as a tryout. He apparently passed the trial because Crownie suggested he fill in for Benchley, which meant that he was given the duties of managing editor with neither the title nor the salary. Dorothy and Benchley, recalled Wilson, “joked about my being a ‘scab,’ but were kind about showing me the ropes and took me for the first time to the Algonquin.” At lunch they regaled him with office gossip. Their attempts to poison his mind fell on fertile ground because ever after he would think of Crowninshield as a “born courtier who lacks an appropriate court” and of Condé Nast as “the glossiest bounder I have ever known.”
On January 25, Dorothy and Sherwood cleaned out their desks and departed; Benchley’s contract required him to remain until the end of the month. Dorothy’s first free-lance job was writing subtitles for a movie, D. W. Griffith’s Remodeling Her Husband, which was being directed by Lillian Gish. When she went up to the newly opened Griffith studio in Mamaroneck, New York, she took Sherwood with her because she hoped that Gish might have work for him as well. Sherry was far more interested in moving pictures than she, but unfortunately Gish did not need him.
Her screen-writing job lasted a week. For a scene in which James Rennie is having his nails manicured in a barber shop, she borrowed from Hamlet’s speech to Horatio and wrote: “The divinity that shapes our ends.” Since this was more or less on a par with her caption writing for Vogue, she may have felt the work uncomfortably regressive. In any case, she sought no further movie work.
At the beginning of February, she moved into an office with Benchley in the Metropolitan Opera House studios, near Times Square. It was a single, jerry-built room on the third floor, little more than a triangular section of hallway that had been partitioned off. It was heated, had a window overlooking Broadway, and cost thirty dollars a month, which was actually no bargain considering its size. “An inch smaller,” joked Dorothy, “and it would have been adultery.”
There was no adultery—nor would there ever be—but they were unquestionably a couple. In 1920, friendship between a woman and a man was not unheard of, but it was uncommon when both people were married, for it was imagined that a spouse would provide all the companionship a person needed. In the case of Dorothy and Benchley, neither of whom were able to confide fully in their mates, they complemented each other psychologically, indeed were kindred souls. Robert Sherwood, who had been obliged to figure all this out during his months at Vanity Fair, described their relationship as intellectual. Nevertheless, he could see that Gertrude was terribly jealous, a reaction that was hardly surprising since they completely excluded her from participation in their friendship.
In the new office, they behaved like impoverished pseudo-newlyweds who were setting up housekeeping. They furnished their cubbyhole with a pair of grubby kitchen tables, three chairs (one for a guest), a hat rack, and their typewriters, all the necessary paraphernalia of writers, and they decorated the walls with their collection of undertaking photographs. Benchley brought in his boyhood diaries and left them open for Dorothy, or anyone else, to browse through. On a bulletin board, they left notes for each other. Before long the office began to fill up with untidy heaps of undertakers’ magazines and yellowing newspapers. They talked about having the door lettered with the words UTICA DROP FORGE AND TOOL CO., ROBERT BENCHLEY, PRESIDENT—DOROTHY PARKER, PRESIDENT, but abandoned the idea, also about applying for the cable address PARKBENCH, but decided the likelihood of anyone sending them a cable was slim. Outside it was a nasty winter with drifts of dappled gray snow and piles of garbage that lay uncollected for a week, but it was cozy in their hideaway, and they delighted in playing house.
Friends were constantly dropping in. Marc Connelly’s job on the Morning Telegraph, a paper printing so much theatrical news it was known as “the chorus girl’s breakfast,” was not particularly taxing. When he needed a convenient place to pass the time, he would come in to visit or to amuse himself by reading Benchley’s diaries. “There was always a laugh to be had with Bob or Mrs. Parker because they didn’t care what they said or did. They would lean out of their window and shout ‘ya, ya’ to people walking along Broadway. Somehow they managed to get pieces done but it was hard to understand how.” Another visitor impressed by the fun they were having together was Charles Baskerville, an up-and-coming artist who was illustrating some of Dorothy’s verse for Life. Mrs. Parker, he remembered, “was gay and jokey and, oh, was she cute.”
Very quickly Dorothy found herself another position as drama critic. Ainslee’s was a literary magazine, respectable enough but steps beneath Vanity Fair in both class and circulation. They gave her a monthly column called “In Broadway Playhouses,” where she was permitted to express her opinions as bitchily as she pleased. She found that she could tap out the reviews with little thought while reserving her energy for the assignments she was getting from more prestigious magazines. During much of the winter she worked on a long piece about the Ouija-board craze for The Saturday Evening Post, then went on to contribute four major articles to the Ladies’ Home Journal. She also made up her quarrel with Vanity Fair, at least with Crowninshield, who had asked her to coauthor a book with him. High Society was to be a snobby little satire giving hints on how to deal with “dowagers, dinners, debutantes, dances, and the thousand and one diversions of persons of quality,” with drawings by Fish and captions by Dorothy, Crowninshield, and George Chappell. When she visited the Vanity Fair offices to see Crownie or to chat with Bunny Wilson, the secretaries whispered among themselves that the real reason for her dismissal was that she had suggested Billie Burke had thick ankles. While Dorothy had forgiven Crownie, her hatred of Condé Nast had not abated. One day, when she and Wilson encountered him in the lobby of the Algonquin, all parties were at pains to reveal no hard feelings. Nast told her he was planning an ocean cruise. “And Dorothy,” he said, “I wish you would come with me.”
“I wish I could,” she replied. But when Nast had walked on, she turned to Wilson and burst out, “Oh, God, make that ship sink!”
After her winter of hard labor money had piled up in her bank account. Benchley too was thriving as an advertising copywriter and book reviewer for the World at a hundred dollars a column. In April, after Robert Sherwood became assistant editor of Life, the humor magazine offered Benchley the position of drama critic, a job that paid a hundred dollars a week plus seven cents a word for additional contributions. About this time, he learned that his rented Crestwood house was to be sold. He and Gertrude found a house they wanted to buy in nearby Scarsdale, but it cost $17,500 and required a $4,200 down payment. A friend offered to loan him bonds as collateral and he borrowed two hundred dollars from Dorothy, which he used to open an account at the Lincoln Trust Company. He then asked the bank to lend him four thousand dollars on the bonds, gave Dorothy back her two hundred dollars, and made up the difference from his paycheck. It was a magical transaction that took place in less than an hour, but the magic to Dorothy was that she had two hundred dollars.
The Life job brought significant changes in Benchley’s habits. He had kept commuter’s hours and hustled back to the suburbs in time for dinner each night. With eight or ten plays opening in a week, he was lucky if he averaged one meal a week with Gertrude on the new job. Often he changed into his evening clothes in a ten-cent cubicle in the men’s room at Grand Central. After a show, if his deadline was close, he stayed in town and slept on the sofa at Dorothy and Eddie’s apartment or at Sherwood’s.
Throughout the spring, Dorothy’s intimacy with Benchley deepened. She told him that she dreamed of doing serious writing—short stories, perhaps a novel, and of course the play they had talked of writing together. He told her about his interest in the Queen Anne period and how he wanted to write a history of the humorists who had lived at that time. Despite their successes since leaving Vanity Fair, they continued to feel insecure about money. They worried about responsibilities they no longer wanted and the costs exacted by one’s foolish choices. In both of their lives, many things were not going perfectly, but it was lucky they knew each other. With a good pal, they knew they would be all right.
An exclusive luncheon club, whose membership he controlled and where he could be the centerpiece, was a delicious idea to Aleck Woollcott. He adored a captive audience at lunch, and, in fact, had a compulsive need for company at all meals. He felt most comfortable when surrounded by friends who tolerated his affectionate abuse, giving as good as they got. No doubt his communal beginnings at the Phalanx accounted for some of this. Now he began to promote subtle changes in the little group that turned up regularly for lunch at the Gonk. The previous fall they had been simply a bunch of writers who wanted a convenient place to eat and “that’s about all,” as George Kaufman later explained. Aside from the professional advantages of having an opportunity to trade shoptalk, meeting for lunch at the Algonquin proved to be relaxing and the food was good. Even though they came in every day, they attracted little attention from either the management or other customers. The Algonquin’s main restaurant, opposite the lobby, was the Rose Room, where it was not unusual to catch sight of theatrical celebrities such as John Barrymore or Douglas Fairbanks. The writers, however, ate at a long table in the Pergola Room (now the Oak Room), a smaller dining room that was decorated with murals depicting the Bay of Naples. From the outset they tended to be cliquish; nobody sat at their table without an invitation and they referred to themselves as “the Board” and to their lunches as “Board Meetings.”
Frank Case appeared unwilling to accept them as full-fledged adults. At that time “none of the boys or girls had done anything in particular,” he wrote. Nor was he convinced they ever would, though naturally the “big man” of the group was F.P.A. because he had the largest salary and a column that could bestow fame on anyone lucky enough to land in it. The rest of the group impressed Case as nothing more than hardworking hopefuls. Woollcott, despite his affectations, was beginning to achieve some popularity. Broun and Benchley were highly regarded journalists but without big followings. Nobody had heard of George Kaufman, who was earning four thousand dollars a year at the Times. Case noticed among the men at Woollcott’s table “a young girl” who shook wisecracks out of her sleeve. She would “simply sit, now and then saying something at which the others would laugh and that was the end of it.” How was he to have known, he protested, that she was a wit? As for Harold Ross, Case must have examined him with an air of incredulity because he described him as “a sort of adopted child, taken in on approval before the final papers were signed.”
The most striking fact about the writers was their vitality and the intense pleasure they seemed to take in one another’s company. They were always laughing and joking, clearly having a terrific time. Unfortunately, the jokes never earned them any money. Two press agents who sometimes ate with them were Herman Mankiewicz and Murdock Pemberton. After lunch one day, as everyone was leaving the hotel, Mankiewicz shook his head sadly as he watched them disperse. He said to Pemberton, “There goes the greatest collection of unsalable wit in America.”
But not for long. Soon they were naming their own price and it was Frank Case, for all his seeming indifference, who proved instrumental in helping them. Not only did he provide a free clubhouse, he also was responsible for an Arthurian table and a concept that lent itself to the creation of a legend. In her book The Vicious Circle, Case’s daughter Margaret wrote that “the Algonquin Round Table came to the Algonquin Hotel the way lightning strikes a tree, by accident and mutual attraction.” Before long her father noticed the size of the group expanding as they pulled up chairs from other tables, overflowed into the aisles and to adjoining tables, and created traffic problems. For practical reasons Case decided to move them to a front table in the Rose Room. That failed to solve the problem either, for even more people showed up to eat with them. Next he seated them at a large round table in the rear of the dining room and gave them a waiter of their own. The sheer size of the table and its location at center stage, plus the fact that Woollcott frequently entertained prominent persons, drew stares from other customers, even those who were important themselves. They fell over themselves to see if Minnie Maddern Fiske was sitting at the round table. Some began asking Georges the headwaiter to identify people who were lunching at the round table: Was that Mencken? H. G. Wells? A cartoonist for the Brooklyn Eagle, Edmund Duffy, published a caricature of the group and he labeled it the Algonquin Round Table. The name stuck. Newspaper columnists were hungry to publish quips that had originated at the Round Table. All this was good for the restaurant’s business, as Frank Case was pleased to notice. He must have decided the boys and girls were growing up, because before long he stopped providing them with free popovers and celery.
Charter members of the Round Table were Aleck Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Frank Adams, John Peter Toohey, Robert Benchley, George Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Robert Sherwood, Harold Ross, and Dorothy. Throughout the early twenties the number of regulars kept climbing and eventually reached thirty or more. At one time or another, Frank Sullivan and Charles MacArthur were participants, as were Herman Mankiewicz, Harpo Marx, Donald Ogden Stewart, Murdock Pemberton, and Deems Taylor. So were Arthur Samuels of Harper’s Bazaar, novelist Alice Duer Miller, playwright Laurence Stallings, and poet John V. A. Weaver.
A comparative latecomer was Edna Ferber, a writer best known for her popular stories about a traveling saleswoman who peddled ladies’ underwear. Ferber was small and homely, thirty-four claiming to be thirty-two, a fiercely driven woman who called herself “a stagestruck Jewish nun.” She dreamed of writing novels that would explore colorful periods in American history, but when she first came to the Round Table in 1921, she had yet to produce such successful works as Show Boat. She had known Woollcott for some years and wrote him a plaintive request: “Could I maybe lunch at the Round Table once?” After that, she was included in the group, even though her appearances at the hotel were infrequent. A compulsive worker who preferred to lunch at her desk, she socialized with the group after business hours. When Ferber showed up, she could parry and thrust with the best of them. On one occasion, Noel Coward had been invited. Both he and Ferber were wearing double-breasted suits.
“You almost look like a man,” remarked Coward.
“So do you,” she replied.
Another writer often associated with the Round Table but seldom seen there was Ring Lardner, a highly paid sportswriter and humorist who had been born in Niles, Michigan, and covered baseball for the Chicago Tribune. Lardner was an almost pathologically silent man in his mid-thirties with bulging eyes and an expressionless face. For many years a heavy drinker, he had developed into a full-fledged alcoholic. His pattern was periods of abstinence alternating with binges that lasted weeks or sometimes months. By 1920, having left the Tribune for a job as a syndicated national columnist with the Bell Syndicate, Lardner was earning thirty thousand dollars from his column alone and decided to move east. Eventually he purchased a house in Great Neck, New York, where he lived with his wife, Ellis, and their four sons, and where he also worked, coming into the city only for business or drinking. Although Lardner had mixed feelings about the Round Table, they honored him with an intensity that bordered on reverence and considered him a master of the short story. They also envied him because, Broun said, “he wrote what he wanted to.” Edmund Wilson suspected that they badly needed “such a presiding but invisible deity, who is assumed to regard them with a certain scorn.”
In addition to Dorothy, there were a number of women who joined the table: actresses Margalo Gillmore, Tallulah Bankhead, and Peggy Wood; writer-wives Ruth Hale and Jane Grant; and novelist Margaret Leech, who had a tongue second only to Dorothy’s for its sting. Lovely, blond Peggy Leech stared at Frank Adams when he arrived at lunch one day after a tennis match. His shirt was unbuttoned to reveal tufts of black curly hair.
“Well, Frank,” she said, “I see your fly is open higher than usual today.”
Before long, the Round Tablers hated to part after lunch. “Conversation was like oxygen to us,” Marc Connelly said. “We breathed each other in our remarks.” Unable to get through a weekend without seeing each other, some of the men began meeting on Saturday nights to play poker in a second floor suite at the hotel. The Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club convened on Saturday afternoons, played throughout the night, and sometimes the marathon continued into Monday morning. Regulars were F.P.A., Broun, Ross, Woollcott, and Kaufman, and joining them were others who practically never ate in the Rose Room—World editor Herbert Bayard Swope, silk merchant Paul Hyde Bonner, and Raoul Fleischmann of the baking-company fortune. Ring Lardner sometimes sat in. His minimalist conversation was practically limited to “Hello,” “I raise,” “I’m out,” and “Good night.” One night, Marc Connelly was losing so badly that he flew into a tantrum and ripped up his cards. Lardner only said, “Childish.” George Kaufman won most often and came up with the funniest retorts. When Raoul Fleischmann claimed he was fourteen before realizing he was a Jew, Kaufman said, “That’s nothing. I was sixteen before I knew I was a boy.” When a player bragged about tracing his ancestry back to the Crusades, Kaufman told him, “I had such an ancestor, too. Sir Roderick Kaufman. He also went on the Crusades—as a spy, of course.”
Eddie Parker, now back at Paine Webber on Wall Street, had freed himself from morphine but had returned to alcohol, a more respectable addiction. After leaving his office each day, he generally went to a speakeasy while Dorothy, feeling abandoned, waited and smoked cigarettes. Sometimes it was 9:00 P.M. before he showed up, by which time she would have spent several hours picturing him run over or dead. He would be safely but unpleasantly drunk, his alcoholic high having already come and gone, “leaving him loud and querulous and bristling for affronts,” as she described a fictional character based on him. Did she know what was wrong with her? he would ask. Immediately she would pull up a chair and give him her undivided attention, always being a dependable audience for any recital of her faults.
Since she blamed herself for the problems of the marriage, she was continually looking for ways to fix them. She decided there was nothing to be lost by a change of scenery, that is to say, by trying the ever-popular geography cure for ailing relationships. They moved south to midtown.
The Parkers rented a flat on the top floor of a shabby, three-story, red brick building at 57 West Fifty-seventh Street, on the corner of Sixth Avenue. It was a commercial property occupied by artists who needed studio space but generally lived elsewhere. Certainly there was little about the place to recommend it as a residence. The high girders of the Sixth Avenue elevated train cast a shadow over the building. Even on the brightest days, the El gave a gloomy aspect to the neighborhood, an unfashionable area of tenements and stores. Each time a train went crashing by, the noise was so deafening that all conversation had to halt. At first, this was disconcerting, but in time, as reality ate away bit by bit at their illusions, as the Parkers edged toward new crises, the racket assumed an appropriate symbolism, providing perfect sound effects for their marital battleground.
Excited by the promise of a Bohemian life, Dorothy was not in the least bit put off by the cramped, somewhat drab quarters. Neither she nor Eddie were domestic. In those days, none of the Round Tablers placed a high value on expensive appointments, and as Marc Connelly mentioned, their apartment had “a chair for everybody,” which was all that anyone expected. Dorothy was satisfied with their new home. Sculptor Sally James Farnham, who owned a pet monkey, had a studio on their floor. Downstairs was the Swiss Alps restaurant, and down the block a drug store that sold decent gin made from pure alcohol.
Along with the flat, they acquired a Boston terrier that they christened Woodrow Wilson for patriotic reasons and a canary that Dorothy called Onan because he spilled his seed on the ground. The Parkers, who had difficulty caring for themselves, did not really need the responsibility of pets, but to Dorothy, no real family could possibly be complete without animals. It was a sign of her determination to cure the marriage that she chose a dog like her beloved Rags. Unfortunately, the Parker household bore little resemblance to the elaborate establishment maintained by Henry Rothschild, nor were there servants to look after the dog. No doubt Dorothy realized that pets need air and exercise and that Woodrow Wilson deserved to be trained and housebroken, but she was unable to manage it. She forgot to take him out, and Eddie, involved in affairs of his own, also seemed incapable of establishing a routine for the dog’s care. In the end, Woodrow Wilson had to make the best of it. When Charles Baskerville visited the apartment to show Dorothy some drawings, he noticed that the floorboards had begun to warp.
In September, she and Eddie planned a New England vacation. On their way north, they stopped at Hartford to visit his family. By this time, Dorothy had fallen into the habit of disparaging her in-laws, as well as the whole city of Hartford, which had to be inhabited by bigots simply because the Parkers lived there.
At Birches, Maine, there was little to do but fish. Every day, even when the water was rough, they went out on the lake to catch trout, salmon, and chub. Dorothy took a conservationist’s approach to fishing. She threw back practically everything they managed to pull in and insisted that Eddie do likewise. She could not bear watching the fish expire. She told him that they had got on the line by mistake and must be put back in case their children needed them. Although exercise held no appeal, the beauty of the island inspired her to take a few hikes. She was delighted to catch a glimpse of a porcupine. Since the water proved too cold for swimming, she never got a chance to wear her new bathing suit and joked about bequeathing it to a hard-up Ziegfeld ingenue. In their room at night a fire was lit, which sounds cozy and romantic, but there was no hint of any sexuality in her relations with Eddie. Writing to Benchley, she did not trouble to camouflage her dissatisfaction.
Some children here have the whooping cough,
If we don’t get it, we’ll be in soft.
The desk clerk’s manner is proud and airy,
Nevertheless, we think he’s a fairy.
There are some people right next door
Who turned out to be a terrible bore.
There always must be some kind of a hitch
Isn’t Nature (finish this line for yourself
and get a year’s subscription to the Boston
Post.)
The main hitch, of course, was Eddie, but she had no need to explain that to Benchley. She did mention that “we’d like a dash of hootch. In fact, we’d like it very much,” but since she seldom drank it is unlikely that she was referring to herself. It seems more likely that Eddie was making an effort to go on the wagon in healthful surroundings, in which case the vacation would have been a strain for both of them. She openly admitted her homesickness for Benchley and barraged him with postcards that she signed “Flo [Ziegfeld] and Billie [Burke]” and “Condé [Nast] and Clarisse [Nast’s estranged wife].” Repeatedly, she reminded him how much she missed him and wished he were there “and that’s the god’s truth.”
Beginning in 1920, when the Round Table was forming, Dorothy became friendly with illustrator Neysa McMein, who had a studio across the hall from Dorothy. Neysa was five years older than Dorothy, an emancipated, frankly ambitious woman from Quincy, Illinois, who had been increasingly in demand to draw covers in pastel for top magazines and commercial advertisers. She looked like a Brunhild—tall, blond, athletic, with a classically beautiful face, masses of touseled, tawny hair, and a grin that dissolved into easy laughter. Neysa was not particularly witty and seldom came up with the mots that flew whenever the Round Tablers assembled, but she took pride in acting as their appreciative audience. Considering the assorted emotional disorders in the group, she was probably the least neurotic person among them, a straightforward woman with a talent for aggressive self-promotion. In her skylighted studio the Round Table established its second home by dropping in each afternoon between four and seven, until it had become an annex to the Algonquin. Sometimes Dorothy skipped lunch at the Rose Room because it was expensive, but Neysa’s open house became a regular stop on her daily circuit.
The studio’s big main room was painted a pale, dirty beige, sparsely furnished, and cluttered with a comfortable jumble of coats, overshoes, and sporting equipment. Neysa never permitted guests to interrupt her work and generally ignored people after greeting them. Even when the place grew crowded and so noisy that conversation was almost impossible, the centerpiece was always Neysa seated at her easel on a raised platform, hair uncombed, faced smudged with pastels, her smock held together with safety pins. In addition to the Round Table, her guests included people from the theater and Tin Pan Alley, the same show-business celebrities whose names appeared in F.P.A.’s column. On a typical day, Dorothy might find Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson, Ethel Barrymore, Jascha Heifetz, and playing duets on Neysa’s piano, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin.
Not every visitor to Neysa’s place succumbed to its appeal, and some hated it. Anita Loos, newly arrived in New York, thought that Neysa was “phony” and dismissed her celebrated guests as being without much interest “except for Dorothy Parker and Herbert Bayard Swope.” She sized up Dorothy as a “lone wolverine,” a woman who had “no belief in friendship” and associated with the Round Table only because she had nothing better to do. As for Woollcott and the rest, Loos never altered her opinion of them as willfully sophisticated suburbanites unable to admit their mediocrity. In But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, her heroine, Lorelei Lee, remarks that the geniuses who eat at the Algonquin “are so busy thinking up some cute remark to make, that they never have time to do any listening.”
At Neysa’s studio the liquor flowed freely. She became proficient at manufacturing gin. In her tiny bathroom she installed a still, a complicated piece of apparatus which required frequent repair by Connelly and Benchley but which nevertheless was much envied by friends who wanted one for their own apartments. Dorothy, intrigued by the still, liked to escort unknowing strangers to the bathroom, where she conducted a personalized tour of the machinery.
One afternoon she encountered Gertrude Benchley at Neysa’s. Most of the time Gertrude remained secluded in Scarsdale with the children, but occasionally she hired a babysitter and came into town to attend the theater with her husband.
It had become almost second nature for Dorothy to make wisecracks at Gertrude’s expense. She characterized her as the sort of woman who might eat her young; anyone who found Gertrude attractive must have a vast acquaintance among the astigmatic—she always looked as if she were rushing from a burning building. Though Gertrude was not fond of Dorothy either, whenever they chanced to meet, they both behaved cordially for the sake of appearances and Robert Benchley. At Neysa’s, Dorothy began making suitably sympathetic inquiries about the Benchley children, so many that Gertrude slowly lowered her guard. When Dorothy later volunteered to pilot her to the bathroom to view the famous still, Gertrude willingly followed. In the bathroom, Dorothy began to freshen her makeup, then noticed Gertrude’s face and presented her with a compact.
“Have some powder on your nose,” she suggested.
“I never use make-up,” Gertrude said, stating the obvious.
When Dorothy insisted, Gertrude gave in and began applying the powder, only to notice a strange transformation taking place. She looked more closely at her reflection in the mirror. Her nose seemed to be turning bright red. Dorothy had given her a cake of rouge.
“That’s not funny!” she shrieked.
Dorothy’s reputation as a funny woman was born at the Algonquin but it developed at Neysa’s. In the opening years of the twenties, when New York humor was quickening its pace, nobody had faster reactions than she did. She had learned all there was to know about speedy repartee in her father’s house, where it had been a staple at every gathering of the Rothschild aunts and uncles, although nothing would have induced her to advertise that bit of personal history. To her Round Table friends like Marc Connelly (who had the impression her father had been a Talmudic scholar, an impression Dorothy never bothered to correct), her tongue seemed born quick and deadly, like a knife already implanted before anyone could catch a glimpse of the blade. There was nothing cheerful or kindly about her barbs; they were meant to be sharp, nasty, and vengeful. She took pleasure in galloping to the punch line before her victims got there. She could be witty on paper, but her forte was oral agility. She was truly at her best in conversation, where she presented the routine she had perfected: demure, deadpan expression, the disparity between a patrician voice modulated to just above a whisper and her inexhaustible repertoire of obscenities.
Wicked put-downs seemed to flow effortlessly. Hearing that a friend had hurt her leg while visiting London, she voiced a naughty suspicion: Probably the woman had injured herself while sliding down a barrister.
Wasn’t the Yale prom wonderful? she said. If all the girls in attendance were laid end to end, she wouldn’t be at all surprised.
At a Halloween party, she hoped they would play ducking for apples. There, but for a typographical error, was the story of her life.
Bidding good night to a friend, she promised to telephone soon, then immediately cracked that the woman spoke eighteen languages but couldn’t manage to say no in any of them.
She excelled at punning word games. When asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence, she answered, “You may lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”
She was developing a bad habit of flattering people to their faces and then condemning them behind their backs. “Did you ever meet such a shit!” she would exclaim. Such denunciations amused some people, shocked and disturbed others, and still others like Edmund Wilson simply reconciled themselves to accepting her capacity for “treachery.” Dorothy acknowledged her compulsion to embrace and denounce by saying, “I cannot keep my face shut” around idiots. It may have been wicked but “as God hears me, I am perfectly justified.”
It also got laughs. She once began ripping apart someone who had just left a party. A friend of the departed begged her to stop. The poor woman was a nice person who wouldn’t hurt a fly.
“Not if it was buttoned up,” Dorothy retorted.
Eddie had accepted her career before and during the war but now discovered that it had assumed unexpected and baffling dimensions: He was married to a woman who was becoming a celebrity. Not only was he temperamentally unsuited to the position of consort, but Dorothy’s friends, with the exception of Benchley, who knew how to make everyone comfortable, made him feel conspicuously out of place. Parkie was, Marc Connelly decided, “a quiet, pleasant young man who was out of his element. He couldn’t keep up with Dottie.” At a party at Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun’s, Dorothy introduced him to Rebecca Bernstien, Broun’s assistant at the Tribune. “I’m almost certain it was his first public appearance after returning from the army. Dorothy said, ‘I want you to meet my little husband.’ There stood a shy, slim, blond young man who impressed me as having been well brought up and nice enough to know but he seemed very embarrassed and had little to say. I thought to myself that it was shabby of her to introduce him in that way.” Parties where Adams, Kaufman, and Benchley were busy trotting out their routines for each other tended to make most people appear dim-witted. Eddie felt totally inadequate. It was just a matter of time before he refused to socialize with the Round Table. “I didn’t see him after that,” Bernstien said. “I don’t even remember people referring to him very much.”
However invisible Eddie may have seemed, he was present in spirit at the Round Table. Dorothy began to concoct funny stories about him, almost as if he were a Mack Sennett character who careered from one perilous episode to the next, dropping his drawers as he went. Practically every day, in her comic scenarios, dreadful accidents sought him out: He almost got run over; he broke his arm while sharpening a pencil; he narrowly avoided plunging into an open manhole while reading The Wall Street Journal.Dorothy’s delivery was deadpan as she strewed banana peels in his path. Her friends broke up hearing about the various pickles Eddie blundered into. Soon they looked forward to hearing about the hapless Parkie’s latest misadventure and egged her on by inquiring about the state of his health. This was her cue: Had they heard about so-and-so’s funeral, she asked. Since she and Eddie arrived early at the mortuary, he decided to pay his respects to the deceased. Kneeling before the coffin, he inadvertently brushed against a knob, gears whirred, a door popped open, and before either of them could react both casket and corpse had disappeared into the flames of the crematorium. They ran out a side door before anyone noticed. It had been a ghastly experience for poor Eddie.
In the earliest days of the Round Table nobody strained to make an impression. Conversation was relaxed and stories flowed unrehearsed. It never occurred to them that their remarks might be worth recording for posterity, although Frank Adams occasionally printed those that had tickled him.
In fact, Frank Adams could be considered the Boswell of the Round Table. He unapologetically filled his column with plugs for their various activities and kept a running chronicle of the most mundane aspects of their lives:
... so to Mistress Dorothy’s and found A. Woollcott there in the finest costume ever I saw off the stage; spats and a cut-away coat, and a silk high hat among the grand articles of his apparel.
... so to a great party at Neysa’s, and had some talk with Miss Ruth Gillmore and D. Parker.
... and so to dinner with R. Benchley and Mistress Dorothy Parker, and then with her to see “Back to Methusaleh.”
To luncheon and found there Mrs. Dorothy Parker and Rob Sherwood and he feeling ill, and was for taking train to Pelham, but I drove him there with D. and she back to the city with me, very pleasant and no chatterer at all.
... and so uptown, and met Mistress Neysa McMein and Dottie Parker, and they asked me to walk with them and look in windows, which I promised to do if they would not beg me to buy them this or that, and they said they would not, but they teased for everything they saw, from emerald necklaces to handkerchiefs. But I was firm and bought them never a thing.
So Dorothy, it seemed, idled away her afternoons window-shopping and partied through the nights but never was she glimpsed sweating over a typewriter—to the old lady in Dubuque, this was the perfect fantasy of the literary life, the very embodiment of New York sophistication.
Sometimes Frank Adams could not resist repeating his own jokes for his newspaper audience. One Monday, after spending the weekend with Harold Ross in the country, he reported to the table that they had gone tobogganing. What did Ross look like tobogganing, they asked.
“Well,” Adams answered, “you know what he looks like not tobogganing.”
Ross, a favorite target of their ribbing, never got off a memorable crack himself. Benchley’s appearance at the table usually meant gentle humor and a comic description of his daily vicissitudes. Hurrying out of a restaurant, he asked the uniformed man at the door to get him a taxi. The man informed him frostily that he happened to be a rear admiral in the United States Navy. “That’s all right,” Benchley said, “then get me a battleship.”
A wag passing Marc Connelly’s chair at the Round Table patted his bald, pink head. “Your head,” he remarked, “feels just like my wife’s behind.” Connelly reached up to touch himself. “Why, so it does,” he replied.
Woollcott’s standard repartee relied heavily on insults. “Shut up, you Christ killer,” he hissed at George Kaufman, who rose to his feet and threw down his napkin. This was the last time, Kaufman said, that he was going to tolerate slurs about his race. He was going to leave, “and I hope that Mrs. Parker will walk out with me—halfway.”
Dorothy spoke infrequently. One of her greatest talents, decided Charles Brackett, was to make a perfect comeback or to say nothing. Peggy Wood noticed that “she didn’t waste them on nobodies,” while Frank Sullivan compared her to W. C. Fields in that her funniest jokes were lost because their obscenity made them unprintable. Marc Connelly thought her best lines were spontaneous. In the street she approached a taxi.
“I’m engaged,” the cabbie said.
“Then be happy,” Dorothy told him.
The Round Tablers were having the time of their lives. Very quickly they had become essential to one another, the way a shining new love drives out all other thoughts. Theirs was a special affection, magical, fierce, childlike. They were remarkably tolerant of each other’s pathologies, which in some cases they shared, and rivalry was curiously absent. Eating lunch soon became the least part of it. They met for breakfast and dinner, slept together, worked cooperatively, and went on group vacations (and on Neysa’s honeymoon after she married a mining engineer). They patronized the same physician, Woollcott’s doctor, who built a lucrative practice administering to their ailments, dispensing diet and sleeping pills and offering his all-purpose remedy for hangovers, colds, and indigestion—high colonic irrigations. The Round Table also acquired its own unofficial psychotherapist.
Always showing off for each other, they could be reasonably confident of receiving attention and appreciation. Their meetings were boisterous enough to attract disapproving stares from outsiders, but they took no notice. They were always their own best audience and needed no one else. If they listened endlessly to each other’s jokes, they also paid attention to each other’s routine headaches, though they tended to hide the big troubles. They were quick to offer comfort. Before long, they began to devour each other’s essences, cannibalizing the lives of the group as raw materials for their own writings. Dorothy was perhaps the first to do so.
Their pleasure in each other’s company had another side. If they found themselves apart for any length of time, they suffered from separation anxiety. Marc Connelly remembered that sometimes after leaving the Rose Room, they would reassemble at somebody’s apartment and then spend the rest of the afternoon discussing where they were going to eat that evening. Noel Coward was amazed to run into the same group of them three times in one day, in three different places. “But don’t they ever see anyone bloody else?” he said.
Marc Connelly could see nothing strange about all this. “We just hated being apart,” he said.
It also was true that not one of them could tolerate being alone, which is a different thing entirely. In fact, the existence of such a group made it possible for them as individuals to avoid loneliness and self-examination. Their habit was to shove the troublesome parts of life, all the painful stuff they found hard to acknowledge, under Frank Case’s big table and pull the cloth down.
One morning in June 1921, Dorothy was visiting the offices of Life, when she was introduced to Donald Ogden Stewart, a new acquaintance of Benchley’s and Sherwood’s. At noon they went to lunch at the Plaza Hotel for a change. When Sherwood returned to work afterward, Stewart accompanied Dorothy and Benchley back to their office. They strolled down Fifth Avenue in the sunshine with Stewart feeling euphoric and thinking that he had found two people who understood him so completely that it probably wasn’t necessary to explain his ideas or even to finish his sentences. That day, he said later, he fell in love with both of them and would remain so for the rest of his life. Stewart was in his mid-twenties, a likeable, attractive Ohioan who had come to the city only six months earlier from Columbus and established himself and his widowed mother in a tiny Village apartment. Bespectacled and prematurely balding, insecure and obsessed with money and success, he was a 1916 Yale graduate who dreamed of becoming a millionaire, but his brief experience in the business world had proved him a misfit there. A meeting in St. Paul with Scott Fitzgerald, another ambitious, impoverished Ivy Leaguer who felt like an outsider, had been fateful. The success of Fitzgerald’s recent novel This Side of Paradisehad inspired Stewart to try his luck at a writing career. When he met Dorothy and Benchley, he had sold several humor pieces to Vanity Fair and The Smart Set, but he remained nervous about his ability to earn a living as a satirist.
Dorothy found him amusing. Like herself, he was fascinated by wealth. He was, she noticed, eager to be “an enlivener of the incessant dull hours of the rich.” Even though he could not resist presenting himself as a “gay dog,” she sensed his serious side. She also praised his writing. Whenever an editor criticized him or rejected a piece, she was quick to take his side and dismiss the editor as dog excrement. If he had a hangover, she pretended to have a worse one. It was this kind of warmth and attention that Stewart badly needed.
If he felt any sexual attraction toward her, it must have been quickly suppressed. He thought she was “absolutely devastating” with her petite figure and gorgeous big eyes, an “imp-at-large,” but she also was a married woman—however unhappily made no difference—and he fell into the same comradely relationship with her that Benchley had. Soon Stewart was a regular visitor at Dorothy’s apartment and at Neysa’s studio. He never was at his ease at the Round Table, because he felt obliged to say something funny, nor did he enjoy exchanging the type of barbs that Woollcott doted on. His friendship with Dorothy and Benchley provided him with constant sustenance. The others struck him as basically unfriendly. Before he joined them for lunch at the Algonquin, he fortified himself with several cocktails.
The more engulfed she felt by the unpalatable aspects of her marriage, the more extravagantly did she unfold her serial accounts of Eddie’s misadventures. The pratfalls she described to the Round Table were actually rooted in reality; chaos was his norm. Like most addicts, he leapfrogged naturally from crisis to crisis and created trouble out of thin air, then professed himself surprised at finding himself in a mess. It was not that Eddie nearly fell into manholes because he was accident prone, but rather that he was accident prone because he was an alcoholic. Whether or not Dorothy understood she was dealing with a sick man is not clear. Her preoccupation with him grew until he became the focus of her existence and nearly all her sentences began with the word he. She spoke of him endlessly and compulsively because she was unable to do otherwise.
If Eddie’s misfortunes fit an alcoholic archetype, her behavior likewise began to fall into the common patterns of those who live with alcoholics. When not trying to control his drinking by urging him to stop, she was busy covering up for him: The mornings he could not go to his office, she was the one who reported him ill; when he passed out, she put him to bed; when he was sick, she held his head. Increasingly her energy was sapped by efforts to keep him on the track, until she began to lose sight of the dangers facing herself.
Throughout 1921, she ground out bushels of fluff for Life or The Saturday Evening Post, much of it humorous light verse that appealed to the same audience who gobbled up Scott Fitzgerald’s frothy flapper stories. Fluff was short, silly, easy to write, and it paid the bills. Typical of her verse at this period was “Song for the First of the Month”:
Money cannot fill our needs,
Bags of gold have little worth;
Thoughtful ways and kindly deeds
Make a heaven here on earth.
Riches do not always score,
Loving words are better far.
Just one helpful act is more
Than a gaudy motor car.
Happy thoughts contentment bring
Crabbed millionaires can’t know;
Money doesn’t mean a thing,—
Try to tell the butcher so!
She judged such early work to be inferior; never would any of it be included in her collected writings.
Articles, by virtue of their length, required concentration, which she often lacked. When assignments failed to get done, letters had to be written, charm turned on, convincing excuses offered. To Thomas Masson, an editor at the The Saturday Evening Post and an admirer of her work, she wrote shameless alibis.
I am ashamed to offer you excuses again, but this has been a ghastly week for us. My husband has had an attack of appendicitis, and they are not sure yet what is going to happen about it. They are still freezing it, which is a pleasant process, and they think they may still get it to listen to reason that way.
Most likely Masson, who had worked with Dorothy at Life, knew her well enough not to be taken in by the sad story of Eddie’s frozen appendix, but he did consider her the best woman humorist in the country. At first she had completely fooled him with her luminous eyes and enthusiastic promises. Then, Masson recalled, “you sit around and wait for her to finish what she has begun. That is, if she has begun. The probability is that she hasn’t begun.”
When he inquired about her progress, she would say that the idea they had agreed upon was rotten. Be that as it may, she was working on it anyway. Next, he would be driving through Connecticut when he would stop at a speakeasy and see Dorothy drinking with Heywood Broun and Marc Connelly. Did she pretend that she didn’t see him?—certainly not. Her greeting would be warm, her manner unconcerned. If not for the fact that she was recovering from a near-fatal illness, she said, she would have finished his piece long ago. Masson could never bring himself to reproach her. Months later, after he had given up, she would send him the article.
Tom Masson found her exasperating because he felt she was “a born artist” who could easily win an important place in American literature if only she settled down and wrote. But “she refuses to write,” he reflected sadly. “All of her things are asides.”
Eddie blamed her for everything. He called her a nag who made his life miserable, so that it was necessary for him to get drunk. By now she was accustomed to walking on eggs with him, never able to predict when a casual remark or an unthinking glance would be misinterpreted and send him spinning into rage or melancholia. Inexplicable as it seemed to her, he would be friendly in one breath, spitting abuse in the next.
Margalo Gillmore, eating one day at the Round Table, watched the expression on Dorothy’s face and thought that it reminded her of a cocker spaniel. “She had eyes like one of those lovely, sad dogs, eyes with deep circles under them.” Gillmore decided that she must have been weeping into her pillow all night to get eyes like that.
Although Eddie frequently threatened to leave, she couldn’t or wouldn’t take him seriously. Nor did she consider leaving him. Marriage was supposed to be forever, a view Eddie presumably shared because he did not carry out his threats. They struggled on as best they could.
Unhappy as she was in her marriage, she did not notice other couples having a better time of it and there were some whom she judged to be doing far worse.
Robert Sherwood introduced her to Scott Fitzgerald and his bride shortly after their marriage, when they were honeymooning at the Biltmore Hotel and working strenuously to carve out daring reputations for themselves. The management requested their departure. Dorothy already knew Scott slightly, having met him in 1919 when he was working at a ninety-dollar-a-week job for an advertising agency and living in a dismal room in Morningside Heights. Penniless, talking about a novel he wanted to write, he had regaled Dorothy with stories about someone he planned to marry, referring to her as “the most beautiful girl in Alabama and Georgia,” even though he was in the midst of a torrid liaison with an English actress. Eventually he had drifted back to the Midwest, but he had returned to the city after selling his novel to Scribner’s, and with him he had brought his Zelda Sayre.
Dorothy suggested to Edmund Wilson that they meet for lunch with the Fitzgeralds. They went to the Algonquin, where they sat not at the Round Table but at one of the banquettes. Dorothy quickly broke the ice.
“This looks like a road company of the Last Supper,” she said.
She believed Scott to be a gifted writer, but found his wife ordinary. She chewed gum and looked like a Kewpie doll. “She was very blonde with a candy box face and a little bow mouth, very much on a small scale and there was something petulant about her.” If Zelda didn’t get her way, she turned sulky.
Whatever Zelda may have lacked as an individual, the Fitzgeralds impressed her as a couple, looking robust with health, as though they had “just stepped out of the sun.” When they moved into a flat around the corner from her building, she visited them. It was hard to understand how Scott got any writing done because the place was a mess, with overflowing ashtrays and unmade beds. Their lives seemed to consist of an endless round of parties and hangovers. If Scott’s drinking rivaled Eddie’s, Zelda’s consumption was impressive too. Toward the end of the year, despite earnings of twenty thousand dollars, Scott told Dorothy that he was completely broke. She lent him a hundred dollars. Not long afterward, Scott admitted that the money had disappeared. He suspected Zelda had hidden it. They fought constantly and themselves predicted their marriage couldn’t succeed.
While most of Dorothy’s wedded friends were less noisy about their troubles than the Fitzgeralds, their marriages seemed no better. Benchley—or Fred, as she had begun to call him—was in a dreadful mess. George Kaufman had stopped sleeping with Beatrice. Frank Adams bedded a succession of young women, whose names he flaunted in his column for his wife and a million New Yorkers to read over their morning coffee. Dorothy could find nothing inspiring about the marriages of Heywood Broun and Harold Ross. Ruth Hale and Jane Grant, paragons of feminist strength, may have kept their maiden names, but they spent much of their time running households and entertaining their husbands’ friends, exactly like those oppressed wives who had relinquished their names.
Another marriage that had gone sour was her sister’s. After a dozen years and two children with George Droste, Helen had finally made the difficult decision to call it quits. Ever since the Droste bakery had been sold to the National Biscuit Company, George had been assured of wealth whether he cared to work or not; mostly he did not. While Dorothy’s contact with Bert and Mate was increasingly infrequent, she remained close to “Mrs. Drots.” She confided in her about the troubles with Eddie and was equally familiar with Helen’s discontentment and George’s infidelities. Her sister had never supported herself, but was accustomed to money and maids. How she might manage on her own was problematic. Helen also feared that if she divorced George he might remarry, sire more children, and disinherit Bill and Lel. The obvious solution was not to divorce him, but that meant Helen would never be able to remarry either. To Dorothy it seemed inconceivable that she and Helen, born well-off and having made so-called good marriages, could be working their way down to poverty. Life was growing increasingly complex for the daughters of J. Henry Rothschild.
Being alone terrified her. It was fine when she felt happy, but if she happened to be melancholy she got “the howling horrors.” With her Round Table friends, who made her feel funny and lovable, the howling horrors could be kept at a distance.
She closed the year 1921 at a New Year’s Eve party given by Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun in the brownstone they had newly purchased on the Upper West Side. It was a large, noisy gathering, some two hundred guests crowded into the first floor, which had been emptied of furniture and filled up with folding chairs so that anyone who wished to could practice the old custom of jumping into the new year. In place of food Ruth and Heywood provided nutrition by brewing up a huge vat of gin and orange juice, which was replenished several times during the evening.
“A great party and merry as can be,” wrote F.P.A., noting that the house had been aglitter with celebrities. “Saw there Mistress Claire Sheridan in the prettiest pink dress ever I saw her wear.... Saw H.G. Wells, too.... Miss M. Leech there too and Mistress Pinna Cruger, one prettier than the other; but I loved Mistress Dorothy Parker the best of any of them, and loath to leave her, which I did not do till near five in the morning, and so home.”