Chapter 6

PAINKILLERS

1922-1923

She could never quite remember the day when she discovered that a drink could make her feel better. It was not hard to remember when Robert Benchley made that discovery: the evening of the championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier. She had been celebrating Dempsey’s four-round victory at Tony Soma’s speakeasy with Robert Sherwood and Scott and Zelda, when Benchley came in and joined them. Although he drank nothing stronger than coffee, it was not unusual to find him at Tony’s, where he was apt to get preachy, always tut-tutting Dorothy about her Tom Collinses and grumpily sermonizing that alcohol made people act unlike themselves. That evening, however, was different. At the urging of his friends, he agreed to sample an orange blossom. When the waiter placed the drink on the white tablecloth, Benchley took a tentative sip, pulled a face, then put the glass down carefully before pronouncing his verdict.

“I hope this place is closed by the police,” he said.

One rainy night several weeks later, having meanwhile broadened his sampling of medicinal spirits from orange blossoms to whiskey sours, he left Tony’s with Don Stewart. Coming toward them down West Forty-ninth Street they saw a man holding an umbrella over his head. Stewart ducked under the umbrella.

“Yale Club, please,” he instructed the astonished pedestrian.

Off they went, leaving Benchley with his mouth open. He could not deny being impressed. After he graduated to rye, he expressed astonishment that the smell reminded him of his Uncle Albert and said that what he always thought had been his uncle’s distinctive odor had actually been whiskey fumes. Perhaps the smell also brought back memories of his father.

Dorothy and Benchley became a regular twosome at Tony’s, where they drank from thick white china cups so heavy that they bounced on the floor without breaking. As a rule, Tony’s customers behaved fairly well, but Dorothy and Benchley in their cups would become rambunctious. When another customer showed them a watch that he claimed was indestructible, they offered to test it: They promptly slammed it against the tabletop, then threw it on the ground and began to stomp on it. Finally the dismayed owner was able to rescue his timepiece and held it up to his ear.

“It’s stopped!” he cried.

“Maybe you wound it too tight,” they replied together.

Although Dorothy still found the undisguised taste of liquor disgusting, she did continue to explore drinking. Gin, she learned, could not be trusted because it made her miserably sick. After a good deal of experimentation, she found that Scotch whisky, without water, was generally quick, safe, and reliable. Eddie urged her to drink, even though Haig & Haig was selling for twelve dollars a quart at current bootleg prices, because he hoped it might lessen her endless scoldings about his drinking. Finally, she agreed. As she later revealed in a short story, drinking together meant an hour or two of cockeyed wild times, before the situation got out of hand. She turned censorious, he called her a lousy sport and an old crab, then he stalked out in a fury. Sometimes he stayed out all night and refused the next day to say where he’d been. Worse were the mornings when she woke with bruises, and she once suffered a black eye.

Whenever she drank with Eddie, the alcohol tended to make her jittery. She did find that drinking without him was enjoyable and that Scotch helped her to function better. It seemed almost miraculous how little sips, spaced regularly throughout the day, could act as an effective tranquilizer.

The best drinking company was Benchley or other Round Tablers like Heywood Broun, who had a habit of fueling himself all day long from his hip flask. Their easy masculine camaraderie allowed her to banish the most recent squabble with Eddie from her thoughts, and there was always one to forget. The liquor made her feel cheerful and loose, clever remarks spun spontaneously from her lips, until everyone was falling down with laughter and she felt appreciated and loved.

Never did Dorothy appear drunk. But she was seldom completely sober either.

In the spring of 1922, she was temporarily distracted from her marital troubles when the Round Tablers presented an amateur musical. A hit revue called Chauve-Souris, was running at the Forty-ninth Street Theater. The Round Table decided to rent the theater on a Sunday evening when the house was dark and to stage their own show, which they planned to call No Sirree. Dorothy’s contribution, the lyrics for a song called “The Everlastin’ Ingenue Blues,” was sung by Robert Sherwood and a chorus line of actresses that included Tallulah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Winifred Lenihan, and a petite brunette named Mary Brandon, whom Sherwood married later that year. Benchley improvised a monologue he had dreamed up in a taxi on his way to the theater. It was a committee report delivered by an assistant treasurer called in to pinch-hit for the regular treasurer who was ill. Though this assistant was a bad speaker, he became caught up in the spell of his own oratory and got carried away. The audience seemed to find Benchley’s “Treasurer’s Report” quite droll. Musically, No Sirree must have been an intriguing oddity, for Deems Taylor wrote the music, Irving Berlin conducted the orchestra, and Jascha Heifetz provided offstage accompaniment.

According to Laurette Taylor, who reviewed No Sirree for The New York Times, it was silly and totally amateurish, a criticism that was beside the point. The Round Tablers had a wonderful time. Afterward, the cast and audience, all friends of theirs, adjourned to Herbert and Maggie Swopes’ for a party that broke up at four in the morning.

After that single performance of No Sirree, Benchley said, “My whole life changed its course.” Irving Berlin and his partner, Sam Harris, thought his monologue was hilarious and wondered if he might want to repeat “The Treasurer’s Report” in the next edition of The Music Box Revue. Benchley was incredulous. He hadn’t even written it down. He wondered whether appearing as a performer might be a conflict of interest for a drama critic. As a joke, he asked for five hundred dollars a week. Harris was silent for a moment, then answered, “Well, for five hundred dollars you’d better be awfully good.” A surprised Benchley promised them he would think it over.

He and Dorothy spent so much time together that people thought of them as a couple. Edmund Wilson believed their relationship was “special” and “rather peculiar” in that Dorothy seemed to regard Benchley as “a kind of saint,” but Wilson did not suppose them to be sexually involved. Others assumed they must be. When a gossip columnist printed an item insinuating they were having an affair, Benchley was so upset that he sought out Parkie and apologized for the columnist’s malice. Even some of the Round Tablers had their suspicions. One evening when Aleck Woollcott was entertaining the son of William Allen White by taking the Harvard freshman to a first night, he began to point out celebrities in the audience. The young man seemed most interested in Benchley, whom he noticed sitting with a dark-haired woman.

He whispered to Woollcott, “And that, I suppose would be Mrs. Benchley.”

“So I have always understood,” Woollcott replied, “but it is Mrs. Parker.” Later he attempted to excuse this bit of nastiness by claiming that he had not yet known either of them long enough to understand the “lack of romantic content” in their relations.

Actually, theirs was very much a romance of the unconsummated, nineteenth-century variety, when the poetic notion of soul mates was not considered extraordinary. Dorothy’s devotion was sororal. Benchley was her precious companion and closest conndant—and she also loved him. There was nothing remarkable about this because his male friends also found him lovable. Don Stewart said it was hard not to love Benchley, because he made people feel warm and clever. “If he had been a woman,” Stewart declared, “I would have married him.”

If Stewart had been married to Benchley, he would have seen little of his spouse. How serious an issue Dorothy was between the Benchleys is unknown, but Gertrude would have a lot bigger problems than Mrs. Parker.

That spring, it became clear that Eddie wanted to end their marriage. As Dorothy would recount in “Big Blonde,”

Each time he left the place in a rage, he threatened never to come back. She did not believe him, nor did she consider separation. Somewhere in her head or her heart was the lazy, nebulous hope that things would change and she and Herbie settle suddenly into soothing married life. Here was her home, her furniture, her husband, her station. She summoned no alternatives.

Suddenly Eddie painted New York City as Gomorrah. He thought that if he returned to Hartford, perhaps he would be able to pull himself together and make a fresh start. Apparently Dorothy refused to take him seriously because she expressed her reaction in a poem that imagined their life together away from the city. The verse is mockingly titled “Day-Dreams”:

We’d build a little bungalow
If you and I were one,
And carefully we’d plan it so
We’d get the morning sun.
I’d rise each day at rosy dawn
And bustle gaily down;
In evening’s cool, you’d spray the lawn
When you came back from town.

She promised to buy a cookbook and learn to cook, and even if the casserole turned out burnt and dry, she knew he would be understanding. She would sew and scrub. If her mind required cultivation she would join a women’s club.

If you and I were one, my dear,
A model life we’d lead.
We’d travel on, from year to year,
At no increase of speed.
Ah, clear to me the vision of
The things that we should do!
And so I think it best, my love,
To string along as two.

A thumb of the nose was her answer to Hartford, and then the ball was back in his court. After so many furious but empty threats, she did not believe he would actually leave. They continued to string along as a couple. Memorial Day found them in Hartford visiting his family. Dorothy took with her a draft of a lengthy article, some nine or ten months overdue, that she had been promising The Saturday Evening Post. It was about out-of-town visitors in New York. Guilty about her tardiness and feeling frantic, she found that the trip provided incentive because she was able to base some of the provincials in the piece on the Parkers and their friends. In a seizure of inspiration, she dispatched it to the editor:

Maybe it’s the New England influence—we are up with my in-laws for over the holiday—but this simply won’t turn out funny. I don’t dare keep it any longer, and so I’m taking a shot at sending it anyway. I look for the worst—

Hopefully, Dorothy Parker

George Horace Lorimer must have been pleased because “Welcome Home” was published a few weeks later.

There was no trip to Connecticut for the Fourth of July. They spent a tense holiday in the city and went to dinner with Frank Adams. Quite soon after this the final explosion took place, and Eddie left for Hartford by himself. With the exception of Benchley, the Round Tablers did not receive an accurate account of the parting. Their assumption, which Dorothy did not bother to correct, was that the separation had been amicable, with Parkie begging her to come along and Dottie naturally refusing because she could not leave the Algonquin to live in a place where people had the mentalities of fruit flies. Not until seven years later, when she dealt with the scene in her fiction, did she describe her husband’s anger and her bewilderment over the impossible actually happening. One day she came home to find him stuffing clothes into a suitcase. When he insisted that he was finished, she did not attempt to talk him out of the decision.

As she had written in “Day-Dreams,” she honestly felt they would be better off apart. But that had been theory and had nothing to do with the emotions that now swept over her, a sadness that she took good care to conceal. Wishing to avoid pity, she proceeded to face her friends well-armored. She pretended that nothing of particular significance had taken place. When some people suggested that Parkie would surely return, she spikily insisted they were wrong and in any case she didn’t care. Privately, she was dwelling on her estranged husband in an obsessive way. Any day she was able to chase him from her thoughts successfully, with the help of Scotch, she counted as a victory.

In August, she passed her twenty-ninth birthday with little pleasure or enthusiasm. Twenty-nine was dangerously close to thirty, which meant to her that the best years of her life were already behind, and all she had to show for them was a failed marriage. Her considerable achievements seemed trivial and suddenly unsatisfying.

Even though Dorothy became known for writing about uniquely female experiences, the theme of her first attempt at short fiction was male oppression, and the oppressed male was Robert Benchley. That she would write about him rather than herself was hardly surprising and certainly not coincidental. In her verse as in her fiction, she always wrote about herself or else drew portraits of people she knew, describing them so vividly that everyone in her circle knew exactly to whom she was referring. She was almost incapable of doing purely imagined characters or situations. In 1922, not yet prepared to expose herself, writing about her own failed marriage proved far too difficult. It was logical for her to address Benchley’s problem, with which she strongly identified anyway.

By the end of the summer, after many months of meticulous work to perfect the story, she finally finished “Such a Pretty Little Picture.” It begins with a man standing in his yard in summer, clipping his hedges, the evening cool with the smell of grass and the funny before-supper quiet of a suburban street. He is daydreaming. Mr. Wheelock is a wimp, an undistinguished man who has no first name and needs none because both his wife and daughter call him “Daddy.” He secretly longs to flee:

Some summer evening like this, say, when Adelaide was sewing on buttons, up on the porch, and Sister was playing somewhere about. A pleasant, quiet evening it must be, with the shadows lying long on the street that led from their house to the station. He would put down the garden shears, or the hose, or whatever he happened to be puttering with—not throw the thing down, you know, just put it quietly aside—and walk out of the gate and down the street, and that would be the last they’d see of him. He would time it so that he’d just make the 6:03 for the city comfortably.

Mr. Wheelock, like James Thurber’s Walter Mitty, contents himself with fantasies and continues to clip his hedges, while his wife and daughter look on from the porch and neighbors passing by remark on what a pretty domestic picture the family makes.

In this tale, Dorothy sensitively developed a character living out the most common, banal of circumstances. Nothing Mr. Wheelock does surprises us, for he is us, the part of us that knows sometimes we cannot do anything we like with our lives, because it is just not possible. While her portrait of Robert Benchley was incomplete, the general outline conformed to his situation and it was uniquely his truth.

She sold “Such a Pretty Little Picture” to The Smart Set, a nonconformist literary magazine, coedited by Henry Mencken and George Jean Nathan, which doted on realistic stories that spoke out against the ignorance and pretensions of the so-called average American. Even though it published superior writers such as Eugene O’Neill and D. H. Lawrence, the pay was modest, probably less than fifty dollars. A dozen years later, when Burton Rascoe was editing a Smart Set anthology and asked permission to include the story, Dorothy replied that “its mother thinks it’s the best thing she ever wrote, which would make it about on a parallel (oh, all right!) with the work of Carolyn Wells’s middle period.”

Writing fiction was a torturous process for her. When she insisted that it took her six months to complete a story, it was often the case. Instead of making a first draft, she thought out each paragraph beforehand and then laboriously wrote it down in longhand sentence by sentence. She may have been careless about many aspects of living, but she was obsessively careful, a perfectionist, in her writing. Nothing pleased her and she couldn’t “write five words but that I change seven.” She named her characters from the obituary columns or the telephone book. The notion of jotting down ideas and phrases in a writer’s journal appealed to her and she managed to start one “but I could never remember where I put the damn thing.” Finally she typed out the story on her typewriter, a tool that frustrated and mystified her, as did all machines. Once, stymied in a struggle to change a ribbon, she abandoned the machine in disgust and quietly resolved the problem by buying a new one.

“Such a Pretty Little Picture” marked the beginning of her literary career, but pride in her achievement was overshadowed by the departure of Eddie, by the emptiness of the flat, and the vague but unmistakable whiff of failure. Since her obsession had arisen and walked away, there was only herself to look after, a person she had never believed worth much trouble. From another perspective, her situation had dramatically improved overnight because now she was released from a variety of humiliations. There was an opportunity to heal herself, if she desired. She did not.

Accustomed to chaos, she hardly knew what to do with herself without Eddie and felt compelled to replace him immediately. Marc Connelly said that “when they were living together I don’t think she had any lovers. But after Eddie left, then the men were in and out of her house like mail.” But not at once. First, Dorothy fell in love.

When she met Charles Gordon MacArthur, he was a twenty-seven-year-old newspaperman with curly brown hair, an elfin grin, and charm that left few people of either sex unaffected. Everyone who knew him, said Aleck Woollcott, “always lights up and starts talking about him as if he was a marvelous circus that had once passed his way.” MacArthur’s beginnings were rooted in poverty and violent religiosity. He was the son of a mother who died early of exhaustion and an Elmer Gantry—like evangelist father who could smell a sinner ten miles away on a windless day. Chasing the ungodly from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Chicago, to Nyack, New York, where he finally settled down, William Telfer MacArthur believed he owned a direct line to the Almighty. Having convinced himself that his six children must be in the sulfurous grasp of Lucifer, he would line them up, MacArthur recalled, “beseech God in a firm voice to forgive us, uncover our backs and whale the hell out of us. He kept a strap soaked in vinegar to make it a finer instrument of the Lord.” At fourteen, he was sent to Wilson Academy in Nyack, a seminary with a curriculum that leaned heavily on prayer and Bible study and with an aim to train boys for the ministry and missionary work. After his mother died in 1913, he ran away to New York City and found employment as a salesman in the necktie department of Lord & Taylor.

From there he moved to Chicago and got jobs on newspapers. During the Pershing expedition to Mexico, MacArthur joined the First Illinois Cavalry, and in the World War he served in France with the Rainbow Division. Afterward he returned to Chicago, where he became a reporter on the Herald-Examiner. By the early 1920s, he and his friend Ben Hecht had become the highest-paid newsmen in the city.

In 1922, he went to work for the New York American, but by this time his ambition was to become a playwright. He met Aleck Woollcott in New York. As drama critic for the World, Woollcott, who had appointed himself keeper of the gateway to theatrical and literary fame, immediately began to regard MacArthur as a fabulous personal discovery. Adoring his wild sense of humor, admiring him extravagantly (as he would his next enthusiasm, Harpo Marx), Woollcott affectionately christened MacArthur “Baby Vomit” and brought him around to the Algonquin to meet his friends.

Since playing matchmaker was one of Woollcott’s favorite avocations, he naturally thought of bringing together Charlie and the woman who was, in his words, “a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth,” and whose lacy sleeve had “a bottle of vitriol concealed in its folds.” Knowing that “our Mrs. Parker,” as he possessively called her, was alone and could use cheering up, he benevolently presented Charlie to her in the manner of a retriever laying a catch at his owner’s feet. Since Woollcott knew that MacArthur had a wife, his gift was not entirely an act of generosity.

MacArthur, in common with Dorothy, had married his first love only to see it turn out badly, which was one reason he was living in New York but his wife was not. Two years earlier, at the Herald-Examiner’s water cooler, he had met Carol Frink whose duties as the paper’s so-called Girl Reporter included covering beekeepers’ conventions or dressing up as a Western Union messenger and delivering telegrams. Frink, a petite blonde with a tiny waistline and hair cut in an Ivanhoe pageboy, was loaded with so much pep that she once turned cartwheels down Michigan Avenue, which struck MacArthur as delightful. A few months later they were married by his father and spent their honeymoon at Coney Island. Frink’s ambition to quit her job and write a novel was encouraged by her husband, who appreciated bright, literary women. In due course he bought her a typewriter, a raccoon coat, and agreed to finance a retreat in the Michigan woods, which she believed a necessary condition for serious writing without interruption.

By 1922, their relationship must have been fraying badly because Frink was not with MacArthur when he moved to New York. While they were separated geographically, the estrangement was far from final. Charlie continued to write her regularly, signing his letters “Charliecums” and similar baby-talking diminutives. Still, he was an unhappy man. Aside from knowing by now that Carol had little talent for writing fiction, he also suffered from loneliness and felt considerable antagonism toward his new home. New York, unlike Chicago, which he considered a reporter’s paradise, struck him as a phony, smart-aleck town more suitable for press agents than for newspapermen. Newspaper reporters customarily were hearty drinkers, but MacArthur drank more than most. Soon he was putting away a quart of Scotch every night. He was not a good-natured drunk. Hanging around subway entrances, he would yell, “God damn New Yorker! Deny you’re a lousy New Yorker!” More than one lousy New Yorker punched him in the mouth. Once, on a spree with his writer friend Gene Fowler, he began to feel sorry for the lonely dogs at the ASPCA pound and decided something should be done for them. Buying birthday cakes at a fancy French bakery, he delivered the sweets in a taxi. “My good man,” he announced to the ASPCA porter, “we’ve come to jubilate with your charges.”

The attraction between Dorothy and Charles MacArthur was immediate and intense, a case of, Marc Connelly thought, “a two-ton truck meetin’ another two-ton truck. That was a collision on the highway there.” She made no secret of the fact that she found him the answer to her prayers or that she was captivated by his sense of humor and a playful recklessness reminiscent of Eddie Parker when she first had made his acquaintance. Soon they were seen constantly in each other’s company, at theater openings, at a party Irene Castle gave for her husband, at Tony Soma’s and numerous other speakeasies (and they were once caught by federal agents in a raid). In the late afternoons they usually could be found at Neysa’s studio, where Anita Loos caught a glimpse of Dorothy looking like a woman very much in love. It seemed clear to her that Dorothy’s “crush” was ill-advised, because MacArthur struck her as a playboy “not to be pinned down by any one girl.”

Dorothy, meanwhile, was busily composing love poetry for Charlie who was, she wrote, her “one love,” a man for whom she wore her heart “like a wet, red stain” on her sleeve for all to see. The Round Tablers, who first had received the news of the affair with amusement, were now amazed at Dorothy’s innocence. Not only was she serious about Charlie but she seemed to expect that he would reciprocate the intensity of her feelings.

MacArthur found her irresistible. She was the type of woman to whom he had always been drawn, even though he probably realized that this type was not necessarily what he needed. To him she was a pretty, successful writer with a Rabelaisian wit and a manner that seemed to be frankly sexual. There is no reason to believe that he regarded her as much more than a casual flirtation. He had disliked being married and now, technically single again, he was enjoying himself. In New York a few months, he had already established a reputation as a woman-chaser who bounced from bed to bed. Neysa McMein presented him with a rubber stamp that printed I LOVE YOU, a convenience in his many conquests, and Marc Connelly summed him up as “just a bird looking for the right twig to land on.” Dorothy chose to ignore the fact that he never remained on any twig for long.

She was distraught when she saw him with other women and could not help bursting into tears, expecting that the sight of her pain might convince him of how deeply she loved him. “Lips that taste of tears,” she wrote, “are the best for kissing.” Charlie did not agree. He was losing interest in her.

To Dorothy’s consternation, she realized that she was pregnant. She had once dreamed of bearing Eddie’s child and only common sense had mercifully outrun her desire for maternity. She felt reluctant to let go of either her lover or her baby. Procrastinating, she worked on a Post piece about novelists who, like Scott Fitzgerald, make fortunes writing about the rebellious younger generation. She lived from day to day in bewildered agony, alternately denying and accepting the certainties of her situation. “It’s not the tragedies that kill us,” she believed. “It’s the messes. I can’t stand messes.” Her untimely pregnancy, a tragedy, also qualified as a sorry mess. She found herself, at the age of twenty-nine, married, pregnant, and carrying the child of another man, also married. Reluctance to abort the fetus only partially accounted for her paralysis. She seems to have been waiting, hoping that Charlie would return to her, hoping like a small child herself that painful choices would magically dissolve and allow them to dramatically shed their legal spouses before riding away into the sunset with their love child.

In the fall she was busy rehearsing for another Round Table theatrical production. Encouraged by the success of No Sirree, the group was mounting a full-scale revue at the Punch and Judy Theatre where they hoped for an extended run. Dorothy and Benchley collaborated on a one-act drama, Nero, whose plot had little to do with Roman emperors but whose characters included Cardinal Richelieu playing solitaire, Generals Lee and Grant, Queen Victoria, and the New York Giants winning a pennant. The Forty-ninershad other sketches concocted by Ring Lardner, Heywood Broun, and Howard Dietz and was staged by George Kaufman and Marc Connelly. Despite the considerable talent involved, it was a grab bag of hit-and-miss sketches, mostly miss. The Forty-ninersopened on a rainy evening in early November and ran fifteen performances before closing. Frank Crowninshield said that maybe he missed the point “but was it all supposed to be taking place in an insane asylum?” Even Woollcott was embarrassed and admitted that the show “wasn’t fun. Not at all.”

Dorothy, in the meantime, could delay no longer. After the revue folded, her doctor performed a legal hospital abortion. There was no problem about obtaining one, so long as she had the means to pay. Her guilt and anguish were exacerbated by the doctor, who was upset to discover in the operating room that she was further along than she had known or had admitted to him. Either from the physician’s remarks or perhaps from glimpsing the fetal material, she became convinced that the embryo’s hands were already formed, confirming her suspicion that she had done something truly wicked.

For a while afterward, she numbly resisted the temptation to speak about the experience, but, in time, the truth became known to her friends. It was a subject she brought up periodically, usually late at night at Tony’s, when she had drunk a great deal and verged on brimming over with great emotional cloudbursts. Then, with little discrimination, she would unburden herself to her drinking companions, mostly males who classified abortion stories as woman talk and wished she would go home and sleep it off. Despite herself, she went on talking, haunted by the memory of the operation.

Cruel stories began to make the rounds of the speakeasies. She was quoted as saying that the experience served her right for having put all her eggs in one bastard. Another piece of gossip reported that MacArthur had contributed thirty dollars toward the cost of the abortion, which had prompted Dorothy to declare that it was like Judas making a refund.

On Christmas Day eight plays opened. It made her angry to imagine that others were at home checking on the fires caused by their Christmas tree candles or strolling to the ice box for a nibble of cold turkey, but she had no tree or turkey, no comfortable fireside where she might warm herself. Her apartment, despite the presence of Woodrow Wilson and Onan, seemed the saddest, loneliest place on the face of the earth, and to top it off she had to “wrap her shabby garments about her and rush out into the bitter night, to see as many as possible of the new plays.”

Most of the time she was tired and depressed. Her tears could be stirred by almost anything—a stray cat, the horses on Sixth Avenue, their heads drooping. She began sleeping all day until it was time to dress and go out for the evening. Scotch, she found, only made her sleepy, and when she woke up, she felt worse than ever. Reveries, visions of serenity, slithered into her head and stuck there. She could not pinpoint any one moment when she first decided to kill herself. Instead it seemed as if the idea had been a possibility as long as she could remember, like an ache that could be ignored most of the time but then began to throb unexpectedly. In truth, she had no great passion for violence. What she objected to was existence, its futility, its complicated surges of sadness that always left her feeling more surprised than angry. Taking herself through a single day presented no burden, but having to repeat the effort day after day was tiresome.

She became intrigued with suicide and began to research the subject like a bloodhound sniffing out a scent. She took the trouble to pore over daily newspapers in pursuit of suicide accounts, hoping to find useful details. Far from frightening her, the universe of self-inflicted destruction seemed cozy and reassuring, almost spellbinding. Somehow she managed to get through a bleak holiday.

At 412 West Forty-seventh Street, Jane Grant and Harold Ross’s newly purchased brownstone, there was a tree hung with gifts for their friends. Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun gave their annual New Year’s Eve party. Dorothy joined an informal bridge class with Jane, Peggy Leech, and Winifred Lenihan. They began meeting once a week at each other’s homes to brush up on their game. She kept her expression cheerful at parties while she continued privately to obsess on ways to kill herself. She wondered how people actually went about it.

When the time finally came, it was easy. Midway through January, on a gray Sunday when mountains of dirty snow melted at the curbs, she slept until late afternoon, as was her habit. It was unusually quiet in the flat because the Sixth Avenue elevated trains ran less frequently on Sundays. The room smelled of perfume, whiskey, and dog droppings, all aromas to which her nose had become inured. Feeling wretched, she huddled under the bed clothes with a bottle and a glass, drinking until she could delay getting up no longer. That evening she was supposed to go to the theater. When she did get out of bed, she hurriedly dialed the Swiss Alps restaurant to order up a meal and then pottered off to the bathroom where her eyes alighted on a discarded razor that Eddie had left behind, an object that must have been in plain view for six months. Whiskey, she would write in “Big Blonde,” “could still soothe her for most of the time, but there were sudden, inexplicable moments when the cloud fell treacherously away from her.”

She cut the long bluish vein on her left wrist, then quickly slashed at the right one.

Some time later, when the Swiss Alps brought her dinner, she was slumped unconscious on the bathroom floor and rushed by ambulance to Presbyterian Hospital.

When Dorothy was sufficiently recovered to receive visitors, she prepared her performance. Even though she looked wan and still felt weak from crying, she greeted her Round Table friends with a cheerful grin and her customary barrage of four-letter words. Pale-blue ribbons were gaily tied around her bandaged wrists, and she waved her arms for emphasis as if she were proudly sporting a pair of diamond bracelets from Cartier’s. Had she been candid about her despair, they might have been forced to acknowledge the depth of her suffering and probably would have responded in a manner more suitable to the occasion. Playing it for laughs, she gave them an easy out.

By the time she left Presbyterian, her self-mutilation had found its place in Round Table lore as one of her unpredictable eccentricities, a gesture not to be taken wholly seriously since she had the foresight to arrange for her own rescue by the Swiss Alps. This version enabled them to shrug off Dorothy’s unhappiness. Marc Connelly was not the only one who had the mistaken impression that “it was a little bit of theater, a young lady’s romantic concept of Victorian melodrama. Coffins and all that, you know.” According to Margalo Gillmore, “some people believed she did it because she wanted attention, although I didn’t understand that because she had a lot of attention.”

Convalescing at home, she was finally well enough to entertain the bridge group. Jane Grant and the others knew she had tried to kill herself but Dorothy chose not to mention her bandaged wrists, which she had tied with black velvet ribbon and oversized bows.

“What’s the matter, Dottie?” someone finally asked.

“I suppose you might as well know,” she answered defensively. “I slashed my wrists. Eddie doesn’t even have a sharp razor.” It was the sort of tough talk that discouraged expressions of sympathy.

Toward the end of January, Eddie returned from Hartford and quietly moved in with her. Dorothy agreed to try again because it seemed to be a logical solution, but she was not optimistic about their future. Charles MacArthur had returned to Chicago, there was no man in her life, and she felt grateful to have someone there. On Valentine’s Day it snowed almost all day and the city looked wonderful through swirling snowflakes. That evening they made their way through the snow-silented streets of the Upper West Side to attend a dinner at Frank and Minna Adams’s apartment. The only other guests were Frank Case and his wife Bertha. Everyone made a special effort to make Parkie feel at home and to regard them as a couple again.

Soon afterward Neysa McMein did an oil painting of Dorothy. She was, Neysa declared, “a design” that was perfect in proportion and linear beauty. She insisted that in her experience no more than five women in a hundred could be called designs. Since Dorothy had always considered her figure badly proportioned, she may have suspected Neysa of pulling her leg but she did agree to pose for the painting, which subsequently was exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute and won an award. Dressed in a simple frock with a demure white collar, she looked at once younger and older than her twenty-nine years. She seems noticeably thin and pale, fragile, her hands clasped tensely on her knees. Her eyes seem to be regarding the world with the dulled cynicism of a woman who knows a great deal more than the viewer.

Feeling the need for reforms in her life, she resigned her theater column in Ainslee’s, the literary magazine she joined after Vanity Fair. After five years as a drama critic, she saw relatively few plays she did not detest. She was beginning to run out of nasty cracks and to repeat herself. The magazine replaced her with a writer who aped her literary mannerisms, an irony because Dorothy was now eager to abandon them. Nineteen twenty-three marked a major turning point in her prose. Until that year, she had taken as her themes subjects that reflected not so much her own preoccupations as the country’s. Throughout the first years of the decade, she was sensitive to the mood of contemporary America. Since that mood tended to be one-dimensional and frivolous, so was her work. For her light verse, she mined and remined familiar terrain—cynical flappers, mothers from Montclair obsessed with Junior’s tonsils, self-conscious young marrieds desperate to be thoroughly modern, America’s obsession with prosperity and mediocrity. Much of what she wrote was mediocre. Nearly everything she wrote found a buyer, in itself a comment on the quality of her work.

What seemed acceptably cute in 1921 made her wince in 1923, and mortified her by 1925. Still, the dozens of hokey verses and prose pieces that she continued to publish initially established her reputation as a humorous poet. Critic-friends such as F.P.A. and Heywood Broun held a high opinion of her verse and so did enthusiastic editors like George Horace Lorimer, who was willing to pay top dollar because it sold his magazine. The content of her verse began to change drastically, as she now marched past her readers a procession of macabre images not generally associated with popular humor. Satin gowns turn into shrouds, decomposing corpses clinically observe the activity of worms, the living dead ghoulishly deck themselves with graveyard flowers. There were alarming glimpses, no more than a series of snapshots, of the tragedies that would be recognized by twentieth century women as peculiarly their own: the gut-searing loneliness of the women who have “careers,” the women who don’t marry, the women who do but divorce; the women deprived of maternal warmth and comfort who are condemned to seek love forever in the barren soil of husbands and children and even animals; women howling primitively for nourishment, flanked on one side by rejecting mothers and on the other by rejecting lovers. Her verse began to acknowledge the timeless subject of female rage.

As the weeks passed, her mental condition became more vigorous, as if the experience of almost dying had cathartically released pent-up energies and purged her depression. Sometimes she felt as if she had died, except that she continued to walk around, holding herself tall “with my head flung up” and carrying “between my ribs ... a gleaming pain.” She began writing another short story, “Too Bad,” this time evidently feeling more confident of herself because she was able to leave Benchley’s life as a fictional subject and move on to her own experiences for the first time:

“Like your pie, Ernie?” she asked vivaciously.

“Why, I don’t know,” he said, thinking it over. “I’m not so crazy about rhubarb, I don’t think. Are you?”

“No, I’m not so awfully crazy about it,” she answered. “But then, I’m not really crazy about any kind of pie.”

“Aren’t you really?” he said, politely surprised. “I like pie pretty well—some kinds of pie.”

“Do you?” The polite surprise was hers now.

“Why, yes,” he said. “I like a nice huckleberry pie or a nice lemon meringue pie, or a—” He lost interest in the thing himself, and his voice died away.

Grace and Ernest Weldon are a childless couple who have been married seven years and are regarded by their friends as models of marital devotion. In reality, they are uncongenial strangers who happen to share the same bed. Warily cheerful, unbelievably polite, they have passed far beyond the point where either of them cares enough to fight, drink, or hate, and they have absolutely nothing to say to each other. The Weldons, unlike the Parkers, do not drink and are in no sense people who lead unusual lives. Otherwise, the alliances are identical. When the Weldons split up, their friends find it incomprehensible and can only murmur trite condolences: It’s too bad.

Just as Dorothy eventually portrayed the early years of her marriage in “Big Blonde,” she recounted its demise in “Too Bad,” which appeared in the July 1923 issue of The Smart Set. The fact that she wrote and published this story while still living with Eddie indicates it was a public announcement, not only to her Round Table friends but perhaps also to Eddie and his family. The concealed message was that while they were not yet ready to part, they had given up.

For the rest of the year, they preserved appearances. In contrast to the frenzied years, they lived peaceably, and once they had accepted the hopelessness of their situation, began to behave like schoolchildren showing their best manners. An understanding of who had been at fault was important to Dorothy. In seeking causes, she blamed the Rothschilds and went on to flagellate herself because as a half-Jew she should have known better than to have married a Gentile, particularly a Gentile above her station. In the peculiar poem inspired by this analysis, she hastened to absolve Eddie from any responsibility in the matter:

Who was there had seen us
Wouldn’t bid him run?
Heavy lay between us
All our sires had done.

In the anti-Semitic “Dark Girl’s Rhyme,” where her self-loathing suddenly bobs to the surface, Eddie’s forebears are portrayed as far from perfect but her own people are dark, very nearly evil, “devil-gotten sinners” dismissed by the Gentile world as fools. Eddie’s rejection of her was only natural. She ignored such factors as their immaturity and the emotional fissures caused by a world war. She also pushed aside the devastating injuries done to their marriage by alcohol and morphine dependencies, which enabled her to avoid asking two crucial questions: What caused her attraction to an addict in the first place, and what was it about her that drew unstable men? She never acknowledged her need for the chemically addicted. It seemed a random event rather than a pattern. Since she could not confront the issue, it was always there, the prepared trap into which she would stumble again and again.

The healing scars on her wrists almost defied detection. As they faded, so did her earlier sense of despair. Suddenly she seemed to be having fun and prospering, earning decent money from Life and The Saturday Evening Post for verse and long feature articles. She guessed that it would be a long time before she made, as she wrote, “a few million—I figure, by the way things are running now, I ought to have it piled up somewhere around the late spring of 2651.” She and Benchley had given up their office. Though she was working from her apartment, they continued to take a close interest in each other’s writing and even collaborated on an advertising brochure for Stetson hats. In “What a Man’s Hat Means to Me,” she was in her usual droll form:

I don’t say that I am one of those big business women that make anywhere between ten and twelve dollars a month, in their spare time, by reading character from the shape of the hair-cut or the relative positions of the mouth and the ear. In fact, if I were to sit down and tell you how often I have been fooled on some of the most popular facial characteristics, we’d be here all afternoon. All I say is, give me a good, honest look at a man’s hat and the way he wears it, and I’ll tell you what he is within five pounds, or give you your money back.

That winter she became friendly with the tall, dark-haired poet Elinor Wylie, whose work Dorothy admired. Most likely, they met for the first time at one of Mrs. Simeon Ford’s poetry dinners, rather hoity-toity literary affairs at which writers were served an excellent meal in exchange for an after-dinner recitation. (“Everyone,” Mrs. Ford would remind her more retiring guests, “must sing for his supper.”) During dinner, conversation turned enthusiastically to Walt Whitman, with one of the guests declaring that the two greatest people who had ever lived must have been Whitman and Jesus Christ. Wylie, asked for her opinion, named John Milton as her favorite poet. Amid cries of general horror and disapproving murmurs of “She says she likes Milton!” (all of which had to be repeated loudly for the deaf Mrs. Ford), the fan of Whitman and Jesus turned to Wylie and said, “I thought you were a good poet. You haven’t been influenced by Milton!” To which Wylie promptly replied, “You admire Jesus Christ, but you don’t behave like him, do you?” Dorothy could not help liking Elinor at once.

Wylie, reputedly a femme fatale, was thirty-seven. Her personal life had been marked by a number of tragedies, including the suicides of a brother and sister, and also by the juiciest sort of scandal. She had been born Elinor Hoyt into a socially prominent Philadelphia family. In 1906 she married a handsome, well-born schizophrenic named Philip Hichborn and bore a son. Four years later, leaving behind her infant, she ran away with Horace Wylie, a married Washington attorney and lived with him in Europe under an assumed name. Wylie suffered from periods of despondency. Once, the story goes, she appeared at the apartment of Katherine Anne Porter, saying that she planned to kill herself and Porter was the only friend she wished to bid farewell. An annoyed Porter replied, “Well, good-bye Elinor,” and shut the door. Having finally married Wylie, she had divorced him and now planned to marry the poet William Rose Benét.

If the Ford parties were made bearable for Dorothy by the presence of Elinor Wylie, sometimes she encountered less welcome people such as Mercedes de Acosta, a face out of the past. The little rich girl who had been Dorothy’s ally at Blessed Sacrament was the author of a novel and two books of verse. A twenties jet-setter who numbered among her intimate friends Eleanora Duse, Marlene Dietrich, and Sarah Bernhardt, Mercedes had married, but it appeared to be a marriage of companionship because her affairs with women were an open secret. Despite their common cause against the nuns at the age of seven, Dorothy was far from appreciative at seeing Mercedes, nor did she wish to be reminded of Blessed Sacrament, where she had spent some of the worst years of her life.

Sailboats from the Manhasset Yacht Club dotted the choppy green water of the Sound when Dorothy made her first visit to the pleasure domes of the very rich. The modest resort towns along the ragged southern shore of Long Island had been familiar to her since childhood, but the north shore constituted an entirely different world. It was not called the Gold Coast for nothing. On East Shore Road in the town of Great Neck, Herbert and Maggie Swope rented an ornate old mansion overlooking the bay. Across an empty field was Ring Lardner’s house, while Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived on nearby Gateway Drive. It was the Swopes’ house that Dorothy made her weekend headquarters throughout most of the twenties.

Herbert Bayard Swope was considered by his contemporaries to be the foremost newspaper reporter of his generation. He was big and overbearing, with the velocity of a human hurricane, the tastes of a Roman emperor, and hair the color of carrots. Cocksure, bouncing from one enthusiasm to the next, he was a compulsive talker and namedropper. The Round Tablers held a high opinion of the man, which had nothing to do with the fact that at one time or another he had employed most of them. Woollcott, F.P.A., Deems Taylor, even Benchley for a brief period, were all World columnists, as was Heywood Broun who said of Swope that if he sounded like a big bluff that was only ten percent right. “He is a big bluff but in addition to that he’s got the stuff.” Having the stuff meant that Swope had won the first Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1917 for his work as a war correspondent and had gone on to become executive editor of the World three years later. Although the paper did not belong to him, he often behaved as if it did and its owner Ralph Pulitzer didn’t seem to mind. When Swope retired from the World in 1928, at the age of forty-six, he sold his interest for six million dollars.

Swope and his wife liked to live on a lavish scale. At Great Neck they turned their house into a summer playground for friends and assorted gatecrashers. Their parties served as the inspiration and model for Scott Fitzgerald as he began writing The Great Gatsbythat summer. Seldom were formal invitations issued. People jumped into their cars and drove until, somehow, they ended at the Swopes’ door. The world and its mistress, as Fitzgerald wrote, gathered at Gatsby’s house and “twinkled hilariously on the lawn.” They chatted endlessly about theater gossip and antiques; they drank and passed out and revived, and they talked stock tips and horse racing. Some of those who accepted Herbert Swope’s hospitality in Great Neck paid him, as they did Jay Gatsby, the subtle tribute of knowing little about him.

Across the way, sipping Canadian ale on his porch, Ring Lardner observed the Swope pageant with annoyance. He seemed irked that his neighbor was running “an almost continuous house party.” There were large numbers of people roaming the woods because the Swopes liked to organize treasure hunts that sent guests scurrying through the shrubbery in search of sapphire cufflinks and other gewgaws. Sometimes the city folks got confused and forgot where they were staying, “for they wander in at all hours demanding refreshment and entertainment at the place that happens to be nearest at the moment,” Lardner complained. Maggie Swope, who smugly called her house “an absolutely seething bordello of interesting people,” showed no trace of concern for her censorious neighbors. Scott Fitzgerald happily described Great Neck as “a very drunken town full of intoxicated people and retired debauchees + actresses,” and thought it was wonderful. Others claimed that anything could happen there. Despite Lardner’s grumbling that the town was becoming a “social sewer,” his complaints seem forced and he too was probably enjoying the spectacle.

The Long Island season began in the spring and continued until Thanksgiving. During these months it was Dorothy’s habit to arrive at the Swopes’ on late Saturday afternoon and settle down on the verandah overlooking the circular driveway with a glass of imported Scotch, all of the Swope liquor having been tested and certified by a competent pharmacist. There she waited for the other guests to assemble. At that hour, it was not unusual to find that her host and hostess had not yet risen for the day, but she generally had plenty of company. Frank Adams might be there, as would Ruth Gordon and her husband Gregory Kelly, Robert and Mary Sherwood, and Ethel Barrymore; Heywood Broun and Aleck Woollcott would be organizing a croquet game; invariably she found an assortment of politicians, gamblers, and poets. Often Dorothy got into conversation with a close friend of Swope’s, a man with a thatch of white hair who she learned was Bernard Baruch. Despite their talks, he continued to mystify her. She knew that he was speculator-rich, negotiated armistices, and kept going to Washington to see President Coolidge, but still she could not figure out exactly what he did. There were two things that would always bewilder her, she joked: how zippers worked and the exact function of Bernard Baruch.

At the Swopes’, tea was served at six or seven, dinner at midnight. No guest of his, Swope boasted, went to bed before three in the morning, although some of them passed out long before that. Maggie Swope engaged two shifts of servants and spent a thousand dollars a week on groceries. If ever Dorothy felt hungry in the middle of the night, she could order a steak or a bottle of champagne. When she awoke on Sundays at noon and rang for breakfast, it was brought on a tray with pink breakfast china that matched the pink linen napkins, along with an assortment of newspapers. The Swopes’ stylish yet vulgar way of living attracted and disgusted Dorothy, who hated their money but wished it was hers. She never wore out her welcome at their house because the only unforgivable sin in their eyes was dullness. Dorothy, never dull, was the perfect guest, who could always rise to the occasion. Seated once next to Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland, she listened politely as a series of questions were addressed to the governor about the state of the union. When this high-toned colloquy was interrupted by a drunk’s noisy belch, she turned to the offender and said she would ask the governor to pardon him.

Dorothy repaid the Swopes’ hospitality by giving them a dog. Their collection of pedigreed pets included an imported English pug that had been a gift from Baruch, two Pekinese, and several German shepherds. Her contribution to their menagerie of purebreds was a cur she rescued on Sixth Avenue after she saw a truck driver kicking it aside. Scooping up the filthy animal, she took her to Neysa’s studio, gave her a bath, and named her Amy. The dog proved to be a good-natured coquette whose only bad habit was a perverse craving for Neysa’s rose madder paints, so Dorothy decided that Amy would be happier living in the country, perhaps in fancy country like Great Neck. The idea of Amy the mongrel installed in the Swopes’ kennel pleased her greatly.

Other estates where Dorothy became a regular weekend house guest included Ralph Pulitzer’s mansion in Manhasset and Averell Harriman’s family seat, Arden House, on the Hudson River. On one visit there, Dorothy took the precaution of bringing along a box of candy because she found the food inedible. Once each summer the banker Otto Kahn permitted Aleck Woollcott to plan an entire weekend and dictate the guest list. Woollcott was free to invite whomever he wished, so long as they were not stupid or boring. Dorothy and fifty or sixty others who happened to be in Woollcott’s good graces at the moment trooped out to Kahn’s 126-room French chateau at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Addie Kahn, having checked Woollcott’s guest list, would flee to New York, leaving her husband alone to entertain “your zoo.” At Kahn’s nine-million-dollar monument to the golden age of capitalism, Dorothy and the Round Tablers consumed fountains of mint juleps and gin rickeys, played Ping-Pong and charades and wild, emotional games of croquet that knocked over garden furniture and broke windows in the greenhouse. Their behavior at meals was not much better. “Can I order from the menu?” Frank Adams asked the footman standing behind his chair. “Or do I have to take the blue-plate special?” Kahn, presiding over the table in the grand ballroom with his dachshunds at his feet, only smiled.

Being a professional guest had decided drawbacks, and there were times when Dorothy accepted invitations against her better judgment. Only after she had arrived and realized her mistake too late did she begin groaning to herself: “I knew it would be terrible. Only I didn’t think it would be as bad as this. This isn’t just plain terrible; this is fancy.” She would be stuck for fifty-six hours with people she abhorred and forced to sleep in a room that reminded her of an iron maiden and drink highballs so lethal that she feared a drop on her bare skin would scar her for life. What she hated most were hostesses who announced that maybe Dorothy would consent to recite “some of her little things for us” after dinner. Dorothy gritted her teeth. “Maybe she would,” she muttered under her breath. “And maybe there was no war.”

Long Island weekends ended on Monday mornings when Dorothy caught an early train to the city. In a bad mood or hungover, she blamed her condition on the Long Island Railroad, which forced her to climb off the train at Jamaica in Queens and board another train. “No matter where I go,” she complained, “I always have to change at Jamaica.” She bet the readers of Life that if she embarked on a nonstop transatlantic journey she would be required to change at Jamaica. It was terrible.

So was going back to her flat under the eyesore El on Sixth Avenue.

Eddie, meanwhile, continued to live with her. During the summer of 1923, they spent a week together in Vermont, and now and then he accompanied her to Swope weekends. Like the rest of the Round Tablers, Dorothy and Eddie had become passionate croquet players. Eddie usually teamed up with Frank Adams, while Dorothy joined Neysa McMein’s team. When darkness fell, the Swope guests flooded the lawn with their car headlights and went on playing until dinner was served at midnight. As fervent as Dorothy could get about the game, she felt this was going too far. Watching from the Lardner porch, she shook her head. “Jesus Christ,” she exclaimed. “The heirs of the ages.”

For a change, things were running smoothly for her. She no longer wrote for The Saturday Evening Post, because after a boring weekend at George Horace Lorimer’s Pennsylvania estate Dorothy had made unflattering remarks that had got back to him. She continued to contribute regularly to Life and also began working for the Bell Syndicate, which paid exceptionally well. She and Neysa teamed up to produce a series of syndicated pieces about celebrities. She interviewed and wrote a profile of the famous person while Neysa sketched a portrait. These assignments hardly felt like work because many of their subjects—Charlie Chaplin, Irene Castle—were people they knew. When assigned to interview Luis Angel Firpo, the Argentinian heavyweight who was preparing to fight Jack Dempsey, they went to Atlantic City where Firpo was training and made a party of it.

Although Dorothy had few memories of her childhood or her mother, she intuitively disliked the Jersey shore, felt uncomfortable about spending even so much as a day there, and sometimes apologized for having had the bad luck to be born in West End. “I was cheated out of the distinction of being a native New Yorker, because I had to go and get born while the family was spending the Summer in New Jersey, but, honestly, we came back to New York right after Labor Day, so I nearly made the grade.” On this occasion, she persuaded Benchley to join them. Flanked and shielded by her two friends, she advanced on the New Jersey coastline as if she were a doughboy revisiting Argonne Forest. Firpo’s house resembled “one of those Atlantic City chalets that looks as if a cuckoo ought to spring from the door every half hour and call the time.” Dorothy was a Dempsey fan but she decided that the “Wild Bull of the Pampas” was “a very nice boy.” After watching him train for a while, they went off in search of fun and wound up at the greyhound races. In contrast with Great Neck, Atlantic City was filthy and the ocean looked so unappetizing they did not bother to go swimming. It was “a horrible dump,” Benchley declared, crowded with “the worst bunch of people I have seen outside of Coney Island.”

In the fall Charles MacArthur returned to the city and his old job at the American, and he rejoined his friends at the Round Table. Dorothy resigned herself to the fact that she could not avoid him, especially since he had become chummy with Benchley. At the end of September, when Jane Grant, Harold Ross, and Aleck Woollcott finally threw a housewarming party for their new communal house on West Forty-seventh Street, she and Charlie got together with Harpo Marx to rent a street carousel so that the neighborhood children might have rides.

Dorothy continued to feel bitter about the abortion, but, since it was a bitterness she could not direct toward MacArthur, she deflected it onto others. Robert and Mary Sherwood were expecting a child. Nearly everyone at the Round Table found the tiny Mrs. Sherwood a thoroughgoing bully and a bore, a veteran whiner who tyrannized her husband with petulant demands to earn more money. Throughout her pregnancy, she spoke aggressively and incessantly about her symptoms and her plans to have a Caesarian. At the theater, whenever the stage action became too intense for her delicate condition, she conspicuously rose and cakewalked up the aisle, until Dorothy’s patience was exhausted. Compelled to offer congratulations after a daughter was finally born, Dorothy wired, GOOD WORK, MARY. WE ALL KNEW YOU HAD IT IN YOU, and sent the telegram collect.

Benchley, enjoying new celebrity as an actor, was appearing nightly in the Music Box Revue. He and singer Grace Moore were the hits of the show. Many theatergoers agreed with Heywood Broun when he wrote that “nothing of the season made me laugh as hard as ‘The Treasurer’s Report.’ ” Benchley had not given up his job reviewing plays for Life, which meant that he often had to be in two places at once. Finally he worked out a system: After going on stage at the Music Box at 8:50, for eight minutes, he dashed to the night’s opening where Dorothy or Don Stewart or Gertrude were covering the first act for him and explained what he had missed.

A few weeks later, without warning, he collapsed with a violent attack of arthritis. In due course, he became virtually disabled and needed crutches to get around. At the Music Box, he left the crutches in the wings and tottered on stage to deliver his monologue.

Gertrude Benchley, assessing the situation from Scarsdale, concluded that working two jobs was grueling, even if one of them required only sixty-four minutes a week. She noted that her husband rarely got home to the country before one in the morning and left for the Life office shortly before eight. Clearly this placed a great strain on his health. Dorothy, who had been paying close attention to the facts, did not make Gertrude’s assumptions. She knew exactly what had gone wrong with Benchley. She knew who had made it go wrong. The only thing she did not know was what he planned to do about it.