Chapter 7
1923-1924
Catastrophes fascinated her. In later years, living in California when summer forest fires were ravaging thousands of acres, she felt horrified at the magnitude of the holocaust, yet traveled many miles to view the blaze. At the sight of the horizon rolling endlessly in flames, she hid her face behind her hands and peered through her fingers. “Think how frightened all the little animals are,” she exclaimed, “the little squirrels, the little rabbits, all the little birds.” It was Dante’s inferno, it was Armageddon, it was the end of the world. She could scarcely believe her good fortune. “Do you think we could get any closer?” she asked the friend who had brought her. In 1923, similarly spellbound, she quietly watched Benchley’s marriage from behind crossed fingers. Not only had she made his domestic woes her chief literary material, but events in Scarsdale also influenced her feelings and subsequent decisions about her own marriage.
In the face of considerable evidence to the contrary, she persisted in regarding him as a slice of packaged white bread, unambiguous and predictable. She could not believe he would leave Gertrude. Both Dorothy and Benchley were genuinely confused. The crux of the matter was loyalty to people and concepts. Decent people, she had declared in “Such a Pretty Little Picture,” “just didn’t go away and leave their wives and family that way.” Tutored and propagandized by the nineteenth century, she believed that to be God’s truth, but she also suspected it was a lie because plenty of ordinary people were running away from their families in 1923. They were taking new spouses or sleeping with people who would never become their wives, or, like Eddie, just allowing themselves to be sucked up by their pasts and returning to hometowns they once had fled in revulsion. They were like Frank Adams, whose entanglement with Esther Root had made him spurn his long-suffering wife Minna after twenty years. It was impossible for Dorothy to believe that Benchley might be capable of a rebellion such as infidelity. “Good Lord,” she had written of Mr. Wheelock in “Such a Pretty Little Picture,” “the last thing he wanted was another woman.”
But her pretty little picture had begun to fade.
Robert Benchley had evolved a pessimistic theory. Each of us, he believed, whether we like it or not, tends to become the type of person we hate most. The idea was thoroughly repulsive to Dorothy. All the same, she had to admit there was something in it that spoke a simple truth. Like all of us who can be more clearsighted about our friends’ stupidities than our own, she could see the accuracy of the thesis at work in Benchley’s life. Only too well did she understand what he feared becoming—a weakling, a failure, a self-pitying drunk—for she felt the identical fears for herself.
The previous summer, while hesitating over whether to accept Irving Berlin’s offer to perform, Benchley stopped at the Western Union office in the Biltmore Hotel, a building that was near Grand Central Station and through which he passed regularly. One day he struck up a friendly conversation with a nineteen-year-old Western Union telephone operator.
By the time the third Music Box Revue opened on September 24 with Robert Benchley as a headliner, the stagestruck young woman no longer worked at Western Union for seventeen dollars a week. Although her name was listed in the playbill, she had no lines, nor did she sing or dance. She was a show girl and, as show girls customarily do, she wore spectacular costumes and impersonated things. In the show’s opening number, “The Calendar,” she was the month of November. In other sketches, she played a nightgown and a fish. In the space of a few weeks, having exceeded her wildest dreams, she had risen from phone operator to the stage of an Irving Berlin hit. The person to whom she owed her discovery was a prominent, exceptionally kind drama critic who appeared to be crazy about her.
Dorothy thought that Benchley’s protégée was “very inferior,” reported Edmund Wilson. It was an opinion shared by other scandalized Round Tablers, in fact by practically everyone who knew Benchley. That he would make a fool of himself over an unimportant woman bewildered them. Never for a moment did anyone publicly question the morality of his having a beautiful teenage mistress—to have objected on that ground would have been the ultimate vulgarity—but rather it was the Proustian ferocity of his obsession that shocked them. Was Benchley going to end up a besotted Charles Swann and want to marry her? His behavior suggested that possibility. Inexperienced at adultery, he was full of extravagant compliments and delighted in explaining to Dorothy why he found the show girl admirable. She had majesty; she entered a room, he said, with the presence “of a queen.” He described her to Edmund Wilson as resembling a grand duchess. When Wilson finally met her, she told him that she was planning to audition for a “leg and fanny show.” Wilson decided she was a floozy, “quite a pretty blonde with thick ankles, who, however, I thought, had something of that hard-eyed prostitute stare, the result of there being no coherence or purpose in a woman’s emotional life.”
Had there been purpose in her life it would have been frustrated. Dorothy, a worldly-wise twenty-nine, could have told her about wayward married men:
Lady, lady, should you met
One whose ways are all discreet,
One who murmurs that his wife
Is the lodestar of his life,
One who keeps assuring you
That he never was untrue,
Never loved another one ...
Lady, lady, better run!
Dorothy had no advice to give Benchley’s new companion, who was not the sort of female she could value or befriend. She appreciated her no more than she did Gertrude, whom she also considered to be a ninny and undeserving of Benchley. On the other hand, neither the show girl with her lack of sophistication nor Gertrude with her suburban matron mentality presented any competition for Dorothy’s unique relationship with Benchley. She continued to be his confidante and hand-holder.
Several times a week Dorothy made a point of dropping in at the Music Box to hear Benchley deliver his monologue, the perfect starting point for an evening’s round of partying. Recently she had discovered the pleasures of champagne and promptly composed a paean to her new drink: “Three be the things I shall never attain: / Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.” Apparently, there were plenty of evenings when she did obtain sufficient champagne. After a performance of the Music Box Revue, remembered Don Stewart, “Irving Berlin came with us up to Dorothy’s apartment where we celebrated my twenty-ninth birthday and with the aid of champagne helped Irving write the last two lines of a new song called ‘What’ll I Do?’ ” She genuinely enjoyed the parties, even if she did wake up feeling wretched the next morning. A doctor had warned a friend of Bunny Wilson’s that if he continued to drink his toes might fall off and that very night he went to a party and got drunk again. In his place, Dorothy would have done the same thing.
Their lives held so many worries and potential worries; sobriety held no allure whatsoever. She worried about Benchley, who ached in every joint and went on stage with temperatures of 103. These ailments may or may not have been connected with his emotional distress, but his doctor diagnosed them as grippe and latent arthritis. Whatever the cause, he was increasingly incapacitated. The conflict could not have been more clear: He was in love, but he could not abandon Gertrude and his children. His attitude was that both women had claims on him, that neither would scarcely know how to tie her shoes without him. There was a period of several months when Benchley was seeking a way out of his predicament, caught at some crossroads between show business and suburbia and agonizing about what to do. During this time, Dorothy conceived the idea of writing a play about Benchley and his attachment to a chorus girl.
In January 1924, Dorothy accompanied Neysa McMein and Irving Berlin on a winter holiday to Miami Beach. When she returned, she and Eddie parted for a second time. He went back to Hartford, and it seemed likely that this second attempt at separation would be permanent, though they continued to be in contact. Since he planned to trade on Wall Street and would be in New York from time to time, he wanted to keep the flat for himself (and, in fact, paid the rent for another two years). Dorothy stayed for several months before moving to the Algonquin Hotel, where she rented a furnished suite.
Henry Mencken called the Algonquin the most comfortable hotel in America. “The distance from the front door to the elevator is only forty feet,” he wrote, “an important consideration to a man whose friends all drink too much, and sometimes press the stuff on him.” The hotel offered Dorothy hot water that was actually hot and a front desk to call if she ever needed anything. She quickly discovered that the simplicity and lack of responsibility connected with hotel living suited her taste perfectly. The limited space also pleased her. Among institutional furnishings she felt free and organized. The Algonquin, of all hotels, was already a second home to her: She had only to ride an elevator to take her place at the Round Table, just as she had once walked across the hall to reach Neysa’s parties. She had not outgrown her need to be in close proximity to the Round Tablers’ hangouts.
Installed in her new home, she settled down to work. Writing had become her salvation. Although she had never written a play, she had done dramatic sketches and songs for the Round Table productions and saw no reason why she could not write a full-length show. Unlike her work habits for fiction, when she wrote so slowly that her typewriter practically spun cobwebs, she found herself tearing off page after page of typescript.
When she had completed a first act, she showed it to Philip Goodman, an advertising man turned theatrical producer who had made a fortune with two recent hits, including Poppy with W. C. Fields. Dorothy had a social relationship with the gourmandizing Goodman and occasionally visited his home for dinner. As a result of his recent successes, Goodman was riding a winning streak and felt confident about his ability to pick winners. He expressed generous praise for what Dorothy had written so far; no doubt, he was intrigued by the idea of a roman à clef about Benchley and his personal problems. He cautioned her that the manuscript needed work and suggested she team up with an experienced playwright. If she liked, he would hunt around, maybe find somebody like Elmer Rice for her. Dorothy could only nod enthusiastically. Aware of Rice’s considerable accomplishments, she knew that he was being called America’s Ibsen. She had praised The Adding Machine as an important play. For these reasons, she doubted if he would be interested in her project. Her excitement mounted, nevertheless, while she waited for Goodman to arrange a match.
Goodman’s daughter Ruth, fourteen at the time, recalls meeting Dorothy in front of the Fifth Avenue building where her father had his offices. “I was sitting outside in the car with my mother when an enchanting little woman came to the side of the car with my father. She was in a blue serge dress with an Eton jacket and a very neat little blouse, extremely soignée, and she was holding on to a Boston terrier she had on a leash, a very feisty little animal. She sat between my mother and me on the backseat and was confidential about her dog. She didn’t want him to hear what she said, and it was one of those side-of-the-mouth undertones as she discussed how impossible he was, how rude he was to her friends. I couldn’t possibly imagine what he put her through each day.”
If Dorothy knew Elmer Rice by reputation, so did he know of her, and what he’d heard were reports of self-indulgence and dissipation. Mrs. Parker was, everyone said, temperamental and unreliable. But Rice had a family to support and he needed money. The Adding Machine, despite its artistic success and a two-month run, had left him broke. He now needed to finance himself while working on another expressionistic tragedy about mechanized society, The Subway. Apart from the money, Rice enjoyed the technical aspects of playwriting and had no objections to accepting a routine assignment at play-doctoring. After reading Dorothy’s first act, even though it seemed clear that she had only a dim notion of how to write for the stage, Rice could not help being impressed. Her characters were sharply defined and “the dialogue was uncannily authentic and very funny.” The problem was that “the characters, suburbanites all, just went on talking and talking.” Her first act, completely formless, ran as long as an entire play. Not without some misgiving, he decided to accept the job.
Rice’s worries proved groundless. They quickly developed a good work routine with Dorothy doing practically all the writing while Rice concentrated on scene construction and plot development. The collaboration could not possibly have run more smoothly. Since Rice found it difficult to write at home with two small children present, he had recently rented a studio. He and Dorothy met there every few days to go over her playscript, page by page and line by line, with Rice suggesting places that needed cutting or rewriting. Once they had polished a section, they moved on to the next scene and discussed it in detail. Then Dorothy, inspired and full of awe for Rice, went home to write.
She felt “so proud” that Rice had agreed to work with her. “I was just trembling all the time because Elmer Rice had done so many good things, and here was I, a small cluck.” It was impossible to believe that any play in which he had a hand could possibly fail. She also gained confidence from Philip Goodman’s belief in his own infallibility. With two hits to his credit, suddenly feeling affluent enough to move from Riverside Drive to Park Avenue, he waxed expansive by saying that success in the theater was not a mystery but simply a matter of being smart. Most producers were saps who failed due to stupidity. With Goodman and Rice on her side, Dorothy felt extremely optimistic.
Working hard, incredibly hard by her standards, she was punctual about her appointments with Rice and diligent in producing promised scenes on schedule, altogether as heavenly a writing partner as anyone could wish. Rice found her “unfailingly considerate and, of course, amusing and stimulating.” More to the point, he was beguiled by this “tiny creature with big, appealing eyes” and upper-class manners, and could scarcely believe the gossip about her lethal tongue. She was the picture of elegant breeding. In his memoirs, as if he had not already made his feelings clear, he felt compelled to add chivalrously that their relations had been “cordial and easygoing, but entirely impersonal.” Not entirely, because he had wooed her persistently and excessively.
Dorothy was not particularly attracted to Rice physically because he was not her type. She preferred tall, slim, cinematically beautiful blonds. Rice was a dour six-foot, red-haired, bespectacled Jew, who had been born Elmer Reizenstein and had changed his name because he thought Rice would look better on a marquee. He must have reminded her of a childhood she had no wish to recall and of her father, who would have dearly loved to change his name from Rothschild to Ross but lacked the nerve. She found Rice to be a gloomy individual, which mystified her because later she pointed out that he had had great success. Against her inclination and better judgment, she finally went to bed with him, but it was one of those cases in which she realized her mistake at once. They were far less compatible sexually than artistically. Dorothy got little pleasure from their several encounters because in years to come she could not resist describing Rice to friends as “without question the worst fuck I ever had.” Once having begun the affair, the problem became delicate: how to end it without wounding his feelings or, far more important, without jeopardizing her play. When she chose, Dorothy could be skilled at evoking protective feelings in men, and in this situation she probably delivered her orphan-of-the-storm impersonation. However she went about rejecting Rice, it worked.
Her affair with Rice left no scars and taught her something useful about herself. As she noted ruefully in “Ballade at Thirty-five,” she was invariably attracted to men who would reject her. On the other hand, once a man began to pay her excessive attention she tended to quickly lose interest:
This, no song of an ingénue,
This, no ballad of innocence;
This, the rhyme of a lady who
Followed ever her natural bents.
This, a solo of sapience.
This, a chantey of sophistry,
This, the sum of experiments—
I loved them until they loved me.
That was, she explained, as Nature had made her.
According to Elmer Rice, Dorothy’s play owed its merit more to her shrewd observations and pungent lines than to the plot. “It was a simple tale of a suburban householder who, bedeviled by a sweetly dominating wife and an insufferable brat, finds solace in the companionship of a neighbor, a former chorus girl; but habit and convention are too strong, and the spark flickers out.”
It is possible to see how Dorothy subtly redrew the characters from “Such a Pretty Little Picture”—the doormat Mr. Wheelock becomes Ed Graham, his shrewish wife is renamed Harriet, and Sister remains Sister—and then went on to introduce a serpent into their suburban Eden. She is Belle Sheridan, an ex-chorus girl, now married to an alcoholic playboy who, having brought her to “Homecrest” (forty-seven minutes from Grand Central) has now tired of her and spends his time trysting with other women in the city. The Sheridans live next door to the Grahams. Ed is afraid of his wife, who constantly denigrates him as a useless fool and refuses to let him play his mandolin or smoke his pipe in the house. Belle is equally unhappy in her marriage, and both are extremely lonely. One day Belle, who plays the piano, invites Ed to bring over his mandolin. They play duets, they talk, they laugh, and they kiss. As the evening progresses, they give in to their attraction for each other and to their mutual neediness and impulsively decide to run away together. It’s possible, Ed insists, to begin life all over again.
When he goes next door to pack, he speedily loses his nerve and terrifies himself by wondering what they will do once they get to the city. Go to a hotel? Register as husband and wife? Make love? Will he be able to satisfy a beautiful woman like Belle when his only sexual experiences have been with his wife?
At the last moment, when Belle notices his fear, she decides to go alone, perhaps secretly relieved knowing she won’t be burdened with him but grateful that he helped her decide to leave her husband. “Don’t you worry about me,” she cries out. “I’m fine. Why, the minute I decided to break away I knew it was what I’d ought to do all along. It was just three years out of my life, that’s all. Now I’m back where I belong.” This is Belle’s creator speaking about her own marriage, for, in many ways, Belle Sheridan is evocative of Dorothy’s actual experiences with Eddie, as well as her imagined fears of what her life would have become if she’d accompanied him to Hartford. Belle’s superficial characteristics—her mentality, her theatrical clothes, her statuesque figure—all seem to be based on Benchley’s mistress, however.
In the final scene, Dorothy wants to show that her hero’s experience with the chorus girl has changed his life too, by giving him more confidence in his masculinity. Now he talks back to his wife and spanks his daughter. As the curtain falls, he is seen sitting defiantly in his living room puffing on his pipe and strumming “that Blue Danube song” on his mandolin.
Constantly on Dorothy’s mind was the issue of choice, not only as the essence of her play but a practical predicament for her and Benchley. Should she reconcile with Eddie? Should Benchley leave his family for a woman he loved? Was the correct decision for her also right for him as well? How many times they had debated these questions. It was their own existential refrain, a piano and mandolin duet they had been practicing for years. At stake, for both of them, was nothing less than their identities and their fears that living, or rather misliving, would transform them into the types of people they most despised.
The play was a love letter to Robert Benchley, who had helped her to wrench free of a dying marriage. Like Belle Sheridan, Dorothy felt “so sure” that she had made the right choice. Her advice to Benchley was “Don’t do it! You stay here!” because she was convinced that his family “would always be on your mind.” She wanted freedom for herself, but needed him to remain a father and husband, solid and leanable, upholding the traditional values of family sanctity.
By early summer the finished play was delivered to Philip Goodman, who scheduled it for the coming season. It was duly copyrighted under the title Soft Music and all concerned with the project were feeling pleased as they looked forward to a lucrative run in the fall.
Reality, by this time, had surpassed fiction in terms of strangeness. In the play, Dorothy had recorded some of the changes in the way people were viewing marriage and the family. Belle Sheridan returns to the city and her theatrical life, while Ed remains in Homecrest, unhappy but faithful to his commitments. It was an indecisive but wholly appropriate ending for the mid-twenties, when marriages ordained to last forever were splitting apart at the slightest pressure, and startled people were sitting in the wreckage, their futures in doubt. When institutions taken for granted kept blowing up in people’s faces, a reevaluation was clearly indicated. It was no coincidence that one of Dorothy’s characters chooses to abandon marriage as a dangerous way of life while the other sticks around and tries to make minor repairs. Unlike Ed Graham, this was not the choice that Benchley finally made.
On the surface, nothing had seemed to change in his relationship with Gertrude, nothing mentioned about harsh realities such as separation or divorce. Gertrude later admitted that her husband hated Scarsdale and that making the trip home each night was “too much for him,” but she was quick to point out that he called her once or twice a day, as if that had made up for his absence. “People asked me if we were going to be divorced,” an idea she scornfully dismissed as “absurd.” Benchley himself later summed up his philosophy for James Thurber by saying that “a man had his wife, whatever their relationship might be, and that was that. The rest was his own business.”
Benchley was determined to have his freedom, and the solution that he devised called for a caper more inventive than anything Dorothy had dreamed up for Soft Music. By all accounts, other than his own and Gertrude’s, he left the suburbs and appeared there only as an occasional visitor. After his arthritic attack, his physician is said to have given him a choice between commuting to Scarsdale and continuing in the Music Box Revue. Since Benchley was contractually obligated to Irving Berlin and Sam Harris, he insisted that he had no choice and promptly rented an apartment on Madison Avenue. Gertrude had to be content with the assurance that he would come home on weekends. If she liked, she was welcome to commute into the city every evening and join him at the theater. If this seemed to offer a fair compromise, it was nothing of the sort because it was a man’s solution. As any mother responsible for the care of small children knows, dashing into the city at the end of the day and returning home after midnight would be an exhausting schedule on any regular basis. As for Benchley’s vow to join Gertrude in the country on Sundays, he became so reluctant to attend those Sunday dinners that he could not bring himself to board the train. His marriage operated according to the rules he set forth, and Gertrude, presumably, came to realize that she had been granted a Victorian divorce, with all the legal rights of a wife but none of the conjugal privileges of companionship. In exchange for Benchley’s discretion with his mistresses, she looked the other way, and they began to live a lie.
The Music Box Revue closed in June 1924 after a nine-month run. The following Monday morning Benchley appeared at the Life office and asked Robert Sherwood for an advance on his salary as drama critic because he owed back rent on his apartment. Sherwood was shocked. Like most of Benchley’s friends, he had assumed that Benchley was growing rich and salting away his wealth in savings bonds, so that he would be free to work on the serious books he talked about writing, “which shows how much I knew,” Sherwood later commented.
As Dorothy knew, Benchley had been spending every penny of his acting salary of five hundred dollars a week. By then, he had been on a spree for nearly a year, and he remained on it throughout the rest of his life. One of the poems she published in The New Yorker was called “For R.C.B.” It emphatically summed up her approval of the new Benchley, who said the hell with conscience:
Life comes a-hurrying,
Or life lags slow;
But you’ve stopped worrying—
Let it go!
Some call it gloomy,
Some call it jake;
They’re very little to me—
Let them eat cake!
Some find it fair,
Some think it hooey,
Many people care;
But we don’t, do we?
Dorothy and Benchley tried to strengthen each other by proclaiming how little they cared for public opinion, but it was wishful thinking and, in the long run, not helpful to either of them. It is not surprising that Gertrude’s initial dislike of Dorothy was hardening. Mrs. Benchley was determined to make no overtly hostile statement, but could not resist an occasional acid aside. In retrospect, she told an interviewer, Dorothy “wasn’t a very nice person—well, no. I won’t say that. Whenever she came up here, she never helped with the dishes—fled upstairs.” A cardinal sin in Gertrude’s book was coming to dinner and not offering to help with the washing up. (It never occurred to Dorothy to wash up her own dishes.) Nor did Gertrude truly understand why Dorothy had separated from Eddie Parker. She professed to be puzzled that “she was fond of him” and yet there were “so many [men] after that.”
About this time Dorothy was confronted by a curious situation when her best friend and her ex-lover decided to live together. One night Benchley encountered Charles MacArthur near the punch bowl at a cocktail party and impulsively said that if MacArthur ever needed a place to stay he could share his apartment.
“I’m a late sleeper,” warned MacArthur.
“Delighted to hear it,” Benchley replied.
Once MacArthur moved into the fourth-floor walk-up on Madison Avenue, where the two men lived for the next three years, Dorothy could not escape his presence without giving up the company of Benchley. As a result, the three of them were often together.
While finishing up the play, Dorothy had put aside other assignments, which now were due or overdue. Always reluctant to refuse offers of money, she had responded favorably to one from publisher George Palmer Putnam, who had cooked up an unusual idea for a serialized mystery novel. Nineteen well-known writers had been invited each to contribute a chapter. Dorothy had unthinkingly accepted, perhaps hoping that when the time came, she would be able to dash off her chapter effortlessly. No writing, even froth, came easily to her. Carolyn Wells had written the first chapter of Bobbed Hair, Woollcott the second, and now the collaborative murder story had a plot whose complications almost defied description and, alas, had magically progressed to chapter seven. It was Dorothy’s turn.
Her standard, well-practiced evasions did not work with Putnam, who was publishing the serial monthly in Collier’s before it appeared as a book and breathing impatiently down her neck. She was further distracted by Benchley’s surgery for his arthritic problems and his subsequent departure for Nantucket to recuperate. After he had gone, the traffic in and out of her Algonquin suite seemed to grow unusually heavy. A number of people had the habit of dropping in and ordering a club sandwich from room service. There was a continual parade of waiters coming and going with pots of coffee. None of this commotion contributed to her concentration. After taking her out to dinner and a show one night, MacArthur reported to Woollcott that she had finally finished the chapter but only after Putnam had threatened to call out the police and fire departments.
A snapshot taken that summer found its way into Aleck Woollcott’s photo album: Dorothy posing with Aleck, Art Samuels, Harpo Marx, and Charlie, who is seated cozily at Dorothy’s side, their shoulders touching, the faintest of smiles on their mouths, smiles of complicity. Her continuing intimacy with MacArthur, who had become romantically involved with comedienne Beatrice Lillie, is interesting in view of other writing she was now doing. As friendly as she had become with him, she had not forgotten or forgiven his rejection of her or the pain he had caused her. The result was a bitter story, her third, this one dealing with the subject of abortion. In “Mr. Durant,” she ventured to characterize MacArthur as a middle-aged monster of a husband and father who tyrannizes his family as well as his mistress and who gets rid of his children’s dog while they sleep. The need to write this story must have been intense because she faced the problem of disguising the identities of Charlie and herself. In the story she exaggerated herself as a naïve, pathetic twenty-year-old stenographer in a rubber plant, a classic victim. Despite her off-beat theme and an extremely hostile portrayal of unfaithful husbands who impregnate their mistresses, she sold the story to Henry Mencken for his new magazine, The American Mercury, and it was published in the September issue. While she had painted MacArthur as a brutally insensitive man, this did not seem to interfere with their cordial relations. Possibly he chose not to recognize himself in “Mr. Durant.”
The Democratic National Convention convened at Madison Square Garden in June. Suddenly the city was crowded with visitors and cars, new revues were opening to cash in on the convention trade, Fifth Avenue was festooned with flags, and women were wearing the new summer styles: nude-colored stockings, floppy hats, and blue-and-pink chintz dresses that looked like flowered wallpapers. At the World, Herbert Swope had installed a radio in his office, and the Round Tablers listened to the convention proceedings on the wireless, or sometimes they dropped by the Garden to hear the speeches. The Democrats finally nominated John W. Davis of West Virginia, but these historical events held little interest for Dorothy, who stuck close to her rooms on the second floor of the Algonquin, regulated her drinking, and got out quantities of work. Like every writer she knew, she wrote when she was not drinking—and she drank when she was not busy working. “We drank our heads off, but we worked like holy hell.” Despite a spell of sultry, sticky weather, so unseasonable for June, she felt better than she had in a long while. After finishing “Mr. Durant,” she began collaborating with George Kaufman on a one-act play, the first and only occasion they ever worked together.
Famous Players—Lasky had purchased the film rights to the Kaufman-Connelly stage hit Beggar on Horseback. As part of the deal, they asked Kaufman to supply a curtain-raiser, a live playlet to be performed on the same bill as the film. Why Kaufman chose Dorothy instead of Connelly as his collaborator is puzzling, because they were not fond of each other. He felt put off by her obscenities, which he considered unladylike and offensive. She thought he was “a mess” and could see “nothing in that talent at all,” although she grudgingly admitted that he could be funny now and then. Somehow they managed to contain their disdain long enough to produce Business Is Business, a forty-minute, four-scene farce that satirized a shoe manufacturer’s obsession with making money. Kaufman at this time happened to be preoccupied with lampooning big business, and Dorothy’s contempt for commercialism was solidly underpinned by her experiences with J. Henry Rothschild and Eddie Parker. The New York Times thought it was a clever play with “scintillating ideas” and “some amusing lines,” but it is impossible to know for certain because neither author liked it enough to keep a copy.
Many of her friends were away. She saw little of Don Stewart, who had written a comic novel, The Crazy Fool, the leading characters of which were based more or less on herself and Benchley. Neysa, married and pregnant, had taken a summer place in Mamaroneck. Aleck Woollcott, writing a biography of Irving Berlin and claiming he needed solitude to work, spent a month on Neshobe Island in Vermont. When she next saw him, he was talking about buying the wooded island as a communal summer retreat for the Round Tablers. She kept running into Harold Ross and Jane Grant who turned up at party after party, passing a hat for a weekly magazine they wanted to publish. Everywhere they went they carried a dummy of the magazine until people were bored seeing and hearing about it. They were looking for investors and hoping to raise fifty thousand dollars from friends, but nobody was biting. None of the Round Tablers believed Ross capable of starting a magazine about New York. Woollcott thought the idea sounded “crazy” and flatly refused to listen. Dorothy listened but had no cash to invest. At a party given by Ruth and Raoul Fleischmann, Jane delivered an enthusiastic pitch that succeeded in whetting Raoul’s interest. By nature a gambler who owned several racehorses and did minor speculating in Wall Street, Fleischmann reluctantly agreed to contribute twenty-five thousand dollars and office space in a building he owned on West Forty-fifth Street.
While trying to raise the remaining twenty-five thousand dollars, Ross went ahead and assembled a small staff. He also badgered his Round Table friends to suggest a name for his magazine. Among those under consideration were Manhattan, New York Weekly, Our Town, and Truth but none of them sounded quite right. Then one day, when press agent John Peter Toohey was lunching with them at the Round Table, the subject came up again. Looking up idly from his plate, he asked what kind of magazine Ross had in mind. A magazine about New York, Ross told him. Well, Toohey replied, then call it The New Yorker, and he returned to his meal.
An elated Ross wrote a prospectus, a model of simplicity and clarity, that described the kind of reader he wished to reach and the kind he did not: “The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about.” No disrespect was intended “but The New Yorker is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience....” By this time, Raoul Fleischmann was developing cold feet; he had checked with a number of experienced publishers who warned him that he had been impulsive and, in fact, rather foolish. Ross had gulled him. Increasingly disturbed, he complained as if he had been the victim of a scam. To pacify him, Ross needed to acquire some impressive window dressing for his project, and he needed it quickly. He hastily assembled a board of editors that included Dorothy, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, Aleck Woollcott, and George Kaufman. In this raid on the Round Table, he was unable to get Frank Adams and Heywood Broun because they were under contract to the World, and Benchley and Sherwood had contracts with Life that would not permit their association with a rival publication. After a short time, Ferber and Woollcott withdrew because they were reluctant to have their names associated with a magazine doomed to failure.
Ever since Dorothy learned that Ross was intending to publish a sophisticated magazine, she had been smiling because he seemed wildly miscast in such a role. For most of the years she had known him, he’d been editing the American Legion Weekly, whose readers probably were the old men in Dubuque. In recent months, he had been working for the humor magazine Judge, but not so long ago she had heard him talking about starting a shipping newspaper, something he had referred to as the Marine Gazette. In her opinion, he was “almost illiterate,” a wild man who had “never read anything and didn’t know anything.” His ignorance was a Grand Canyon among ignorances, so deep that one was compelled to admire it for its sheer size. Never would she forget the evening he took her to see Nazimova in The Cherry Orchard. “At first he sat silent. Then he said, and over and over throughout the evening, in the all-but-voiceless voice of one who comes suddenly upon a trove of shining treasure, ‘Say, this is quite a play—quite a play!’ He had not seen it before. He had not heard of it.”
With this “monolith of unsophistication” at its helm, the future of The New Yorker augured poorly. Allowing Ross to use her name for his advisory board may have been a fraud (“the only dishonest thing I ever did,” he said later about this phony board) but it meant nothing to Dorothy, who was preoccupied with Soft Music. Unlike Ferber and Woollcott, she didn’t particularly care if her name was connected with a flop. Ross explained that the advisory board might be called upon to offer editorial advice or contribute an occasional piece, but he warned that payment was out of the question. He planned to reimburse writers with stock in his company. He also wanted contributors to write under pseudonyms so that the magazine would be able to project a unique character.
Hearing all this, Dorothy reacted by speedily putting Ross’s New Yorker out of her thoughts.
In July, after Benchley returned to the city, Dorothy amused herself by accompanying him to the brothel operated by Polly Adler on West Fifty-fourth Street. The idea of drinking champagne in a bawdy house delighted her and she liked Polly. So did Benchley, who opened a charge account and began keeping a black kimono there. Though he played backgammon with the madam for the services of her women, which were currently going for twenty dollars a throw, he had begun thinking of Polly’s as a second home where he slept or even worked. Polly Adler was devoted to Benchley, who, she said, “lighted up my life like the sun.” She made certain that he received the finest treatment. In the mornings, he woke to find that Polly’s personal maid, Lion, had pressed his suit, washed his socks and underwear, and was waiting to serve him breakfast in bed.
Dorothy and Benchley thought that Polly’s house could use a touch of culture, and they were pleased to offer their assistance. They drew up a shopping list of classical and contemporary books for her bookshelves. In due course, Polly’s patrons had at their disposal a nice selection of literary works.
At the age of thirty-four, Benchley was busy sowing his wild oats. Since he and Charlie MacArthur had been rooming together, they had become inseparable. There were times when Dorothy found herself excluded from their escapades as they bounced around the city like teenagers. They once chased the aristocratic Charles Evans Hughes down Madison Avenue, spraying him with cries of “Yah, yah, Secretary of State.” Dorothy could not enter into this sort of adolescent, alcoholic male bonding, probably luckily for her.
In September, Philip Goodman discovered that life as a Broadway producer was not all roses. His new musical, Dear Sir, was practically laughed off the stage on opening night when a horse in the cast defecated on stage, distracting performers and audience alike. Although the show had music and lyrics by Jerome Kern and Howard Dietz, the critics decided that the production was indeed manure, and it folded after fifteen performances. Goodman, unnerved, ordered production temporarily suspended on Soft Musicand indicated he would probably abandon it altogether.
Shortly after the failure of Dear Sir, Goodman suffered a second blow when his next offering, The Mongrel, directed by Dorothy’s friend Winnie Lenihan, also proved mediocre and had to be withdrawn. By now, Goodman was devastated and decided that he wouldn’t proceed with Dorothy’s play unless he was able to find someone willing to coproduce and stage it. To her relief, he finally persuaded Arthur Hopkins to be his partner. Hopkins, an Ohioan by birth, taciturn by temperament, was a veteran producer with many successes to his credit, among them such quality dramas as Hedda Gabler and Anna Christie. At first, the addition of Hopkins did not displease Dorothy. Nor did she object when Goodman and Hopkins changed the name of the drama from Soft Music to Close Harmony, even though the latter seemed to her no great improvement over the former. But once rehearsals began, she became increasingly worried about Hopkins’s directorial technique, because he seemed to have none.
Each day at noon, after the cast had been put through their paces by the stage manager, Hopkins drifted in and leaned against the proscenium arch. He looked on almost indifferently, rarely if ever interrupting, and occasionally took an actress or actor aside for a few moments of whispering. After a while—a very short while—he departed for the day. It had been explained to Dorothy that Hopkins believed performers should work out their own readings and stage business, but watching him in action was far from reassuring. She caustically dubbed his directorial style “the Arthur Hopkins honor system of direction.”
While Dorothy worried, Hopkins leased one of New York’s most expensive theaters, the Gaiety, for the sum of four thousand dollars a week and announced to the papers that Close Harmony would open on December 1. This further alarmed Dorothy, who knew from her experience as a drama critic that attendance is always poor before Christmas. When she voiced her doubts to Hopkins, he brushed them away.
“Whenever you open this play,” he assured her, “it will run for a year. ”
Close Harmony had its out-of-town preview in Wilmington, Delaware. Dorothy and Elmer Rice accompanied the cast, who were traveling in a reserved parlor car. A private compartment had been set aside at one end of the car for the writers and producers, but at the last minute they were joined by several of the actresses, including Georgie Drew Mendum, who had been cast as the Gertrude Benchley character. Dorothy disliked Mendum almost as much as she did Mrs. Benchley. A garrulous descendent of two theatrical royal families, the Barrymores and the Drews, she was in the habit of regaling people with stories about dear Jack and dear Ethel, as well as other members of the clan. On the train she talked nonstop. Elmer Rice remembered that since the train did not have a dining car, there was no escape from her. He and Dorothy and the two producers fidgeted and stared out the window at the New Jersey farmland. “We were trapped, elbow to elbow, knee to knee,” Rice said.
When the train pulled into Wilmington, everyone disembarked and began straggling down the platform toward the taxi stand. Dorothy, watching them leave, remained near the train door with Goodman and Rice.
“Let’s go to Baltimore,” she said.
Without a word, they grabbed their suitcases and climbed back on the train just as it was pulling out. Only then did her bewildered companions begin to object. What could she be thinking of, because there was plenty to do that evening in Wilmington.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, “but I just couldn’t look at them anymore.”
It was after eight when they arrived in Baltimore, starving. Goodman telephoned Henry Mencken, who invited them to his hotel for drinks and dinner. Not only did Dorothy respect Mencken as an innovative publisher, but also she had a personal reason for feeling warm toward him: he had published every short story she had written thus far. On this particular evening, she was disappointed to find him coarse and insensitive. Even allowing for the immense quantities of alcohol they were consuming, Mencken acted badly. When he began to tell jokes about blacks, Dorothy bristled and decided to leave. She refused to spend the night in Baltimore and made Rice take her to Wilmington, even though it meant riding a milk train that got them there at three in the morning.
The next day, exhausted and hung over, she sat in the darkened theater with Arthur Hopkins during dress rehearsal and decided that the play was insipid. Hopkins appeared to be studying the bouncing breasts of Wanda Lyon, the actress playing Belle Sheridan.
“Dorothy,” he said, “don’t you think she ought to wear a brassiere in this scene?”
“God, no,” she replied. “You’ve got to have something in the show that moves.”
On opening night, the first laugh of the evening was hers, in response to a wry telegram she received from Benchley. THAT OLD FILLING HAS JUST COME OUT, it read. After that, the laughs came from the audience who chortled straight through until the curtain fell. The next day, when she saw that the local critics had hailed the show a winner, she began to hope again. During her years as a drama critic, she had complained incessantly about tedious opening nights, but watching people on stage speaking words she had written was another matter entirely. It was “the most exciting thing in the world.” When Close Harmony opened in New York the following week, she was still feeling euphoric and confident enough of success to throw an opening-night party at the Algonquin.
Despite excellent reviews and hosannas for “Miss Dorothy Parker, who is known as New York’s brightest girl,” customers were slow to buy tickets. The third week, after a matinee when the house was practically empty, Dorothy sent a telegram to Benchley that read, CLOSE HARMONY DID A COOL NINETY DOLLARS AT THE MATINEE. ASK THE BOYS IN THE BACK ROOM WHAT THEY WILL HAVE. By guaranteeing the Gaiety Theater four thousand dollars a week, Hopkins could not afford to carry the play. A week later, he posted the closing notice. The play had run twenty-four performances and grossed less than ten thousand dollars. Hopkins subsequently assigned touring rights to another producer, who changed the play’s name to The Lady Next Doorand opened it in Chicago the following summer. There it played fifteen weeks, followed by another ten weeks in smaller Midwestern cities, to fine reviews and substantial houses. As Elmer Rice later wrote, “These things are inexplicable.” Ring Lardner was also puzzled. Writing to Scott Fitzgerald in Rome, he reported that Close Harmony was a good play that had gotten great notices and still it failed. To Dorothy the failure seemed nothing short of astonishing, an enormously bad joke that she could not comprehend and would be unable to talk about. In years to come, when asked about it, she supposed that “it was dull,” and yet “how do you know about your own.”
Philip Goodman, who had enough of the theater, went to Paris for the winter. He and Hopkins may have been relying on the enthusiastic support of the Round Table to ensure success and a long run. Perhaps they also had counted on its being a spicy open secret that the play concerned Robert Benchley, but audiences were not privy to this titillating bit of rialto gossip. Benchley had the unenviable task of reviewing a work based on his own messy domestic life, but with which he could not admit any connection. He found the play deeply moving, especially the scene in which James Spottswood and Wanda Lyon play a mandolin and piano duet to the tune of “The Sunshine of Your Smile,” and decided it was “just about as heartbreaking a thing as we have ever seen on the stage.” On the evening that he attended Close Harmony the audience apparently began to laugh during this scene and he took it badly. In his Life review he inferred that they must have severe personality disorders and singled them out “for special and painful extermination next Monday morning, rain or shine.” If he saw anyone so much as daring to grin during the scene “you will receive, on leaving the lobby, one special souvenir crash on the skull which will make it awfully difficult for you to laugh at anything again. That’s final.” Close Harmony was, in his opinion, closer to “magnificent tragedy” than to comedy.
Both Dorothy and Benchley felt murderous but as usual they veiled their anger with humor. Dorothy wished she could be a pirate so that she might cut out the hearts of everyone she hated. After the play closed she wrote a revealing poem for Life and called it “Song of Perfect Propriety”:
Oh, I should like to ride the seas,
A roaring buccaneer;
A cutlass banging at my knees,
A dirk behind my ear.
And when my captives’ chains would clank
I’d howl with glee and drink,
And then fling out the quivering plank
And watch the beggars sink.
I’d like to straddle gory decks,
And dig in laden sands,
And know the feel of throbbing necks
Between my knotted hands.
Oh, I should like to strut and curse
Among my blackguard crew....
Given the chance, she would do all that and more. Certainly she felt capable of destroying those who had injured her.
But I am writing little verse,
As little ladies do.