Chapter 8
1925
During that winter of 1925 there seemed to be no end to the number of men passing through her life and her hotel suite. Their names were “ever written on the pages of my heart—and, by the way, my dear, what was your name?” Chiefly, these visitors were in transit. It was the period that Marc Connelly was thinking of when he likened her apartment to a mailbox. Connelly’s description of one of those lovers could serve as a portrait of all:
She fell in love with some of the goddamnedest terrible people. John What-the-hell-was-his-name—society boy with the famous brother, you’d know the name if I could remember it. He and his brother were very, very, very East Hampton. Handsome guy, pretty good tennis player. He was a wealthy mucker and quite a bastard. We were all delighted when she shook him off—he was dandruff. Have you got a list of her beaux? Not a full list? Well, I wouldn’t think so.
After months of hard work she was pleased to be idle. She wanted to have fun, which meant dating sizable numbers of rich, good-looking men. No doubt she felt genuinely enthusiastic about some of them, but these affairs were certainly nothing more serious than crushes. The string of men offered the illusion of accomplishment and helped to obscure the fact that Eddie Parker had dropped out of the picture by now. She insisted on being called Mrs. Parker, wearing the title as grandly as if it had been inherited. Whenever impertinent people inquired why she continued to call herself Mrs., she answered defensively that there had been a Mr. Parker once. Although she thought of Eddie in the past tense, neither of them had decided to obtain a divorce, and he remained her legal husband until 1928. Among those who remembered his existence was Gertrude Benchley, who professed from her outpost in Scarsdale to find the banishment of Parkie and his replacement by a bunch of Long Island playboys incomprehensible. “She dedicated one of her books ‘to John,’ but by the time the book came out it was quite another John! Lucky it was a common name like that.”
Dorothy learned that there were special benefits to be derived from her celebrity as a playwright, even from being a failed playwright. An attractive, successful woman who had passed the age of thirty, who no longer expected men to respect her so-called purity, was able to wield a type of power over males, not genuine power, of course, but a counterfeit that seemed real. Suddenly swarms of men seemed eager for her company, for no other reason than that she was Mrs. Dorothy Parker. She had her pick of polo players, low-brow moguls who had never heard of James Joyce, gentleman stockbrokers, and all the assorted frog-princes who congregated in Great Neck. Even those who found clever women terrifying, which included most of them, could not suppress the urge to pay court. Since sex seemed to be her only immediate reward for the failure of Close Harmony, she had every intention of milking that painful experience for its current worth. She wondered if it was worth anything, and suspected not.
Because your eyes are slant and slow,
Because your hair is sweet to touch,
My heart is high again; but oh,
I doubt if this will get me much.
Even though she felt drawn toward men with money, she secretly abominated them and undertook it as her mission to punish them, even those she genuinely liked, even those who worked hard for their money. Her attitude toward these men can be summed up in her treatment of Frank Case, the manager of the Algonquin Hotel, whom she seldom bothered to pay for her suite. She convinced herself that her presence was good publicity for the hotel, that in fact Case should feel fortunate to have her living there rent-free. One Christmas when friends asked if she planned to hang up a stocking, she said, “No, but I’m going to hang up Frank Case,” which she had, in fact, been doing all year.
She also derived satisfaction from hanging up wealthy men, thinking of them as rich Neanderthals who could well afford to pay for the privilege of being seen around town with one of New York’s most sought-after women. There were times, however, when her gorge rose and she could not control her contempt. At Ralph Pulitzer’s estate in Manhasset one evening, she stared for a long while at the face of a man sitting across from her. Then she turned to her friend Peggy Leech and blurted out, “He looks just like a pig, doesn’t he, Peggy?”
Donald Stewart thought that any man who got emotionally involved with Dorothy “would have found out, little by little, that she wasn’t really there.” At first this wouldn’t be apparent because she was always so much fun to be with, but eventually it would become clear that “it was her emotion; she was not worrying about your emotion.” While striking fancy poses and whipping herself into an emotional frenzy got her adrenaline moving, that white-hot heat also served a serious purpose; it generated salable verse and enabled her to deposit checks into her bank account. In this respect, she was no more calculating than Scott Fitzgerald who, in April, published his novel The Great Gatsby, which he had extracted from his and Zelda’s eighteen-month residence in Great Neck. His characters were modeled on people he had met at the Swopes’, who were some of the very same men winding up in Dorothy’s bed at the Algonquin and, eventually, in her verse. Both Dorothy and Fitzgerald were adept at sucking the juices out of people. All those pretty playboys had their practical uses. Once she had melted down and recycled them, they behaved much like men in Pasadena or Tulsa and were instantly recognizable to readers of her verse.
In the humorous verse she wrote in the mid-twenties, men were little loves who sweetly, if naïvely, presented her with “one perfect rose,” never considering that she might instead have preferred a good solid Rolls-Royce. Like exotic insects under glass, men became her subject of special study. She was prepared to announce conclusions about the entire species. Men were incapable of passing up a speakeasy, a poker game, or a golf course, which meant that they often neglected to call at the precise time they had promised, while women wasted their time waiting for them. In fact it sometimes seemed that “all your life you wait around for some damn man!” Furthermore: They were seldom capable of experiencing sexual attraction for a woman who wore glasses, unable to suppress their boasting about others with whom they slept, and perhaps most distressing, totally incapable of accepting a woman as she was. When younger, Dorothy wrote, she had done her best to indulge men in their fantasies, had even tried to change herself to suit their rattlebrained theories. Now, in her thirties, she understood that if you scratched a lover you would find a foe. It was safest, therefore, to look upon the male sex as a temporary entertainment because
By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying—
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
In the winter of 1925 it was she who was doing most of the lying.
“YESSIR, THE WHADDYECALL’EM BLUES” That year, Seward Collins fell in love with a cabaret singer named Lee Morse from her phonograph records, and then contrived to meet her. Her big hit was “Yessir, the Whaddyecall’em Blues.” Even though her fans liked hot tunes, she preferred romantic ballads, some of which she wrote herself. One night after a party Collins took Bunny Wilson and his wife, Mary, and several other friends to the club where Lee Morse was singing, and they wound up drinking unidentifiable, practically undrinkable liquor that was served in ginger ale bottles. When Lee Morse joined them, she confided to Mary Wilson and Alice Seldes that she was waiting for a marriage proposal from Sew, not because she planned to accept but because she wanted to be asked. Alice, knowing the twenty-six-year-old Collins to be an immature and vulnerable bachelor, warned him about Lee Morse. Before long, however, Collins stopped seeing her because he had fallen in love with Dorothy.
Seward, always called Sew or Sewie, was born in Pasadena in 1899, into a well-to-do family who owned a chain of cigar stores. They sent him to Princeton where he became friends with Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. In 1920, after Wilson took over Benchley’s job at Vanity Fair, he brought in Collins as a regular contributor. Later, when Wilson moved to The New Republic, he continued to assign articles to Collins, whose background and liberal political views paralleled his own. By the time Collins met Dorothy, he was eager to use his wealth to further his publishing ambitions and was negotiating to buy a literary journal called The Bookman. His claim to fame fell into the area of sexology rather than literature because he owned a collection of obscene English literature said to be the largest in the world.
Collins took extreme pride in his erotica, although those who remember it say that by today’s standards it would be rated tame. What it lacked in sophistication, it more than made up for in quantity, for he was a compulsive buyer. A spectacular number of boxes and trunks were stored at his country house in Connecticut. The really wild items he kept in his Manhattan apartment, which was a virtual gallery of old and new masters. Running into Sewie at a speakeasy, Marc Connelly remembered, generally meant an invitation to stop by later for a nightcap and a look. It was not uncommon for Collins to arrange formal showings, where he would display recent acquisitions.
Dorothy had known Collins casually for several years but paid him slight attention. Not only was he six years her junior, but he was undistinguished physically, being of medium height and pale, mousy coloring. He had an ingratiating smile and was a talker, which annoyed some people, but his friends found him witty and amusing. When Edmund Wilson drew up an imaginary guest list for an ideal party, he put Sewie and Dorothy near the top.
Despite Collins’s infatuation with Lee Morse, he was very much aware of Dorothy, very admiring, and flirted discreetly. His interest in sexology did not mean he personally was sexually emancipated. In contrast to Benchley, for example, who was too busy copulating to gaze at pictures of people doing it, Collins was strictly a spectactor who, according to Marc Connelly, always comported himself like a gentleman around women and who behaved “like a nice guy.” Nice guys did not impress Dorothy.
That spring he backed her into a corner at a party and smothered her with excessive compliments. He seemed exactly the sort of man she had meant when she wrote, in “Experience,” that “some men fawn and flatter.” Not long after that, someone at The Bookman,Collins no doubt, enthused over the prettiest spring hat in New York. “It was on the head of no less a beautiful person than the pleasant Dorothy Parker, maker of plays and verses and dramatic criticism. It was large and low and green—pale green, along the side was a sheaf of pussy willows. There’s a hat to square yourself with, sir.” Seeing Dorothy’s intense eyes next to the pussy willows knocked all thoughts of Lee Morse out of his head for good.
The Bookman also reported that Dorothy was working on a play and would soon embark on a novel, inaccurate information supplied by Dorothy herself. On the evening she had blabbed all this to Collins, the night she was wearing the pussy willow hat, she had been in the company of Elinor Wylie. She had spoken about a new novel she had started, and Dorothy, not wishing to be outdone, had fabricated a fictitious work schedule on the spot. She couldn’t get rid of Collins fast enough. He was one of those naïfs who assumed writers must always be busy writing, just as dentists were forever drilling. Routine though his questions may have been he greatly irritated her.
Meanwhile, the first issue of The New Yorker was published on February 21. Jane Grant admitted that she and Ross were “not proud” of its debut. F.P.A. expressed disappointment: “To H. Ross’s, and he showed me a copy of the New Yorker, which is to be issued on Tuesday, but most of it seemed too frothy for my liking.” James Thurber called it, without exaggerating, “the outstanding flop of 1925.” Ross had been expecting his board of editors to help out with contributions and found their lack of assistance disheartening. The first issue appeared without the Round Tablers, nor were they present in succeeding issues. The single exception was Dorothy, who contributed drama reviews for the first two issues under the byline “Last Night.” Despite the pseudonym, there is no doubt of their authorship: “... we bashfully admit that we wept, and lavishly; but on the other hand, it is but fair to admit that we are that way. All you have to do is drop a hat, and if we are in any kind of form we will break down and cry like a little tired child.”
For the second issue, again out of the goodness of her heart, she turned in another theater review, as well as a poem, “Cassandra Drops Into Verse,” and a short story, “A Certain Lady.” Then, except for some unsigned verse in July, she was not heard from until September, when she sent in the poem “Rainy Night.”
During the The New Yorker’s first year, she regarded her contributions as charitable donations, certainly not what she considered serious work. In any case, she wanted to be paid.
Writing, she decided, was turning out to be a nasty profession. “And what do you do, Mrs. Parker. Oh, I write. There’s a hot job for a healthy woman.” It was a pity she hadn’t the foresight to have taken a course in interior decorating, she said. Why anybody would choose a career as a writer mystified her, and she swore that if she had a choice she would prefer to clean out ferry boats, peddle fish, or be a Broadway chorus boy. The problem was, “I wish I didn’t have to work at all. I was made for love, anyway.” Since that was not to be, she wished that she knew how to write prose that would earn a lot of money. Poetry was not the answer. “This is a fine thing to be doing, at my age, sitting here making up sissy verses about broken hearts and that tripe,” and getting a dollar a line for it. What she actually wanted was payment “in chunks, not drips.”
Despite her jokes, the painful truth was that sometimes she found herself exceedingly hard up. “She was ignorant about money,” a friend said. “All she knew was that she needed it.” Given her attraction-repulsion about money, the way she went about practicing economies was peculiarly her own. She continued to give the Algonquin IOUs in lieu of her rent. Since she was always asked out to dinner, meals were not a problem. She was even able to arrange the expense of entertaining so that it cost her nothing but the price of club soda and ice. Most afternoons around five, people came in for drinks. A frequent visitor at the ritual cocktail hour was painter Allen Saalburg, who would drop in with his wife, the fashion designer Muriel King. “Dottie needed to have people around her all the time but she never had any money. So everybody would bring a bottle and put it down some place, to show they had earned their right to be there. She welcomed almost anybody.”
Her chief expenses were for necessities: clothing, perfume, Johnny Walker cigarettes, and liquor. And now she hired a part-time maid. Ivy (whose surname has been lost) was a young black woman who supported herself and a small son. She was said to be an accomplished cook, but, since Dorothy seldom ate at home, she had no use for Ivy’s culinary skills. In the morning Ivy would arrive and brew coffee. If Dorothy was still asleep, as was generally the case, Ivy moved softly around the suite, tidying up the dirty glasses from the previous evening and washing and ironing Dorothy’s designer nightgowns. By noon, she was ready to move on to her other employers. Sometimes, if Dorothy was giving a more formal cocktail party, Ivy would return to pass drinks. While she seems to have performed these minimal duties perfectly well—Dorothy swore she would never entrust her laundry to anyone else—Dorothy still professed to find her inadequate. It pleased her to have people around who lent themselves to dramatization, as Eddie had. For the moment, Ivy was the chosen one. With characteristic deviltry, Dorothy complained freely about her, until Ivy became infamous as a slovenly, abnormally inefficient horror whom Dorothy lacked the heart to discharge.
When Dorothy’s Boston terrier, Woodrow Wilson, died, she grieved extravagantly for him. He had reminded her of Rags, and after Eddie left, he had been her constant companion wherever she went. Although it could never be said that Dorothy had actually trained him, the dog had somehow learned to comport himself decorously in speakeasies, parlors, and offices. Though Woodrow Wilson’s passing left a gap in her life, she could not bring herself to take the disloyal step of replacing him.
Throughout the spring of 1925, restless and dissatisfied, she began to draw closer to the Round Tablers again. Benchley was often away. Frequent excursions to the hinterlands to deliver “The Treasurer’s Report” on the vaudeville circuit had become a necessity, because he had grown accustomed to earning a large salary, living a spendthrift life, and piling up debts. In his absence, Dorothy turned for companionship to Frank Adams, who was currently single again. Dorothy had always liked Minna Adams, a former “Floradora girl” who had been unable to bear children and instead babied her husband and her cat Mistah. Dorothy had taken no sides in their breakup.
For as long as she had known F.P.A., he had chased women, although his amorous techniques overflowed with hostility. At a party when he made advances toward a statuesque ingenue, she accused him of caring only about her body. Adams promptly agreed and cautioned her to take good care of it because when it was gone she would have nothing left. Sometimes he gave a titillating kick to his affairs by mentioning the women in his column as Mistress so and so.
Edna Millay had introduced him to Esther Sayles Root, an accomplished woman in her early thirties who studied music. Adams had fallen in love. The affair turned serious and resulted in his divorce. They planned to marry.
In the interim, Adams depended on women friends like Dorothy to fuss over him, even though his behavior was more highstrung and grouchy than ever and he was not the most cheerful of companions. Dorothy went out of her way to humor him. At a dinner they attended at George and Beatrice Kaufman’s, he whined into her ear throughout the meal about the necessity for paying his income tax, but Dorothy was able to supply little consolation. Filing tax returns often slipped her mind, and she claimed to have once told a tax collector that she had stayed home all day on March fifteenth but nobody came. When Dorothy coaxed Adams into joining a card game, he groused about disliking hearts and, to prove it, promptly lost eighteen dollars. On another occasion, a party to which she had not been invited, she obligingly trotted around to his apartment and helped him dress.
One Sunday, Dorothy made plans with Adams and Edna Ferber to motor into the country and stop at a rustic inn for luncheon. Among the Round Table regulars, she disliked Ferber second only to George Kaufman, because she categorized Edna, along with Kathleen Norris and Fannie Hurst, as a writer who manufactured potboilers. In later years she found the idea that Ferber was actually making a fortune from her overstuffed novels to be insufferable and roundly denounced her as an oil well gushing dollar bills. “I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right words.”
When she and Adams arrived at Ferber’s apartment, they found her in bed pleading illness, although to Dorothy she did not appear sick. She was wearing a frothy pink bed jacket that would have been sensational on a Ziegfeld Follies vamp but looked seriously silly on a woman as homely as Ferber. The sight amused Dorothy, who told F.P.A. afterward that Ferber “was not so ill that she did not look lovely, with the pink maribou flowing like water.” Adams was fond of Ferber, but that did not prevent him from printing Dorothy’s catty crack in The Conning Tower.
Before long Dorothy’s most persistent suitor was Seward Collins, who trailed after her as if he were a beggar at a moveable banquet, an approach guaranteed to lower himself in her esteem. Sewie’s dependency and Dorothy’s lack of respect for him supplied plenty of gossip for the Round Table, even though her friends agreed that he was precisely the sort of person she needed. To them, he was a well-heeled intellectual who wanted to marry and look after her. To Dorothy, Sewie was a fool, but in superficial ways he seemed to be suitable. He showered her with attention and presents and even paid some of her bills. She was sublimely indifferent because, once again, she had gravitated toward an ill-considered, unsatisfying relationship, having lately conceived a great affection for a married man.
Deems Taylor was the most eminent music critic in the country, a small, blond man with a bespectacled face and crinkled smile who resembled an affable gnome. Physically, he was as far removed as a man could possibly be from the movie-idol types she preferred. His tongue, as efficient as a buzz saw when it came to slicing fools into small pieces, was a match for hers. She first met him in 1920, but even before that, she had known him by reputation as “Smeed,” one of the most gifted writers of light verse to appear in The Conning Tower.
One thing she liked about him was that he disliked working as much as she did and put off assignments until the last minute. Even so, he was the most prolific, versatile person she had ever known. Apart from criticism, he was also a gifted composer, a skilled cabinetmaker, architect, painter, and illustrator. His personal life had been chaotic. During the war he married a journalist named Jane Anderson, a brilliant, strikingly beautiful, unstable woman, and both of them worked as war correspondents for the London Daily Mail. By the time Jane returned from Europe she had become lovers with writer Gilbert Seldes, and that ended their marriage. Now Taylor was married to Mary Kennedy, a Broadway actress with whom Dorothy was acquainted. In fact, Mary had been among those performing “The Everlastin’ Ingenue Blues,” the song that Dorothy and Deems had written for No Sirree. Lately Taylor had grown dissatisfied with his life. Not only had he resigned his position on the World because the job left no time for serious composing, but he and Mary had embarked on a trial separation before deciding whether or not to end their marriage.
When Dorothy first began the affair with Deems, he was only one of many men with whom she was involved, but soon her interest began to focus on him exclusively. With the neediness that invariably consumed her whenever she fell in love, she grew increasingly demanding of his affection and his time. Taylor, probably unprepared for such a development, began to back off and the romance soon began to suffer difficulties.
Things were going badly when the Round Tablers and their friends gathered to attend Frank Adams’s wedding to Esther Root on May 9. The ceremony was performed at the home of friends who lived near Greenwich, Connecticut. A number of the wedding guests arrived in extremely low spirits, because it looked as if The New Yorker would fold. Five months after its birth, the magazine’s original capital was depleted and it seemed unlikely to survive the summer season, customarily a slow period even for prosperous publications. Raoul Fleischmann had been advised that the wisest course would be to suspend publication until the fall, but Harold Ross and Jane Grant were convinced that this would mean ruin for the magazine. They had begun to seek capital elsewhere. In the midst of Adams’s nuptial festivities, Fleischmann arrived with a miraculous last-minute reprieve and announced that he had persuaded his mother to invest $100,000, enough to assure the summer issues at least.
For Dorothy, F.P.A.’s wedding day was marked by an excess of champagne and caviar and unpleasant quarreling with Taylor. When Elinor Wylie and Bill Benét invited her to spend the night at their New Canaan home, she left. She squeezed into a taxi with Elinor and Bill, as did a number of the other wedding guests: Edna Millay, her husband Eugen Boissevain, her former lover Arthur Davison Ficke, and his new wife, Gladys. By the time they reached New Canaan, the fare had risen considerably from the agreed-upon price, which ended in a violent quarrel. Exhausted, everyone settled in the dining room for food and drinks to restore their nerves before heading up to bed. Dorothy remained downstairs, having a nightcap with Elinor and Arthur Ficke, when Elinor asked her to say aloud some of her verses for Ficke. Even though Dorothy had not the slightest desire to recite poetry at that hour, she made a polite effort to oblige. To her astonishment, Arthur Ficke began to offer unsolicited advice and told her that her verse could use work. Dorothy knew that Millay once had been in love with Ficke and still referred to him as her spiritual adviser, but Dorothy certainly felt no affinity toward the man and was not concerned about her spiritual development. To her, he was nothing more than an ex-lawyer and a third-rate sonneteer. His presumption that she would accept a tutorial was an added affront, because she felt competitive with Millay and hated critics’ calling her an imitator of Millay’s light verse.
Incensed, she excused herself and went up to bed. Just as she was dropping off to sleep, Wylie and Ficke rushed in because Elinor wanted to show the scars on Dorothy’s wrists, apparently to convince him that Dorothy had indeed taken suicide seriously. Dorothy burst into tears.
In some ways, Deems Taylor acted as a positive influence on her. His decision to resign from the World and devote himself to creative work impressed her deeply, inspiring her to consider carefully her own future. When she told Seward Collins that she was working on a novel, it had been a partial lie; writing a novel had been on her mind. With Taylor’s example before her, she returned to the idea, or at least to thinking about it.
In many other ways, her relations with Taylor proved a source of familiar misery, terrain she had traversed in her affair with Charles MacArthur. Both of these married men were associated with the Round Table, thus falling safely, but incestuously, into the category of extended family. Neither of them was legally or emotionally available to her, even though their marriages had tailed off to the point where they seemed to be. Dorothy was aware that Taylor felt undecided about a divorce. Depressed, her mood degenerated into morbidity. A poem she wrote in June suggests how insubstantial and unsafe rejecting men made her feel:
The first time I died, I walked my ways; I followed the file of limping days.
She sensed herself plunging into that same torment again:
The next time I died, they laid me deep. They spoke worn words to hallow my sleep. And I lie here warm, and I lie here dry, And watch the worms slip by, slip by.
Harold Ross agreed to publish “Epitaph,” even though death and decomposition were scarcely subjects that his readers found screamingly funny. Indeed, the poem was not the least bit entertaining. Ross ran it without her byline.
In addition to documenting her pain in her writings, she also needed to share unhappiness with her friends, particularly with Benchley. At this time he was abroad with his family, vacationing after his extramarital liaison had turned cold. Adams was also in Europe on an extended honeymoon, and Aleck Woollcott, who had limited tolerance for hearing about the entanglements of heterosexual love, confided in Murdock Pemberton that the messiness of Dorothy’s affairs left him sick at his stomach and that if he ever decided to have an affair, he would choose a waitress.
As it turned out, the person most sympathetic toward Dorothy’s troubles was Ring Lardner. Encountering him at F.P.A.’s wedding, she aired her problems with Taylor and complained that she wanted to begin a novel but couldn’t find the necessary solitude. Lardner was in the middle of an extended drinking spree that had begun in early May and continued until the middle of July. Impulsively, he invited “Spark Plug” Parker, as he liked to call her, to be his houseguest. The visit would cheer her up, he promised, and she would have complete privacy to write.
Arriving in Great Neck with her typewriter, she walked into a situation that did not bode well for concentration. As Lardner admitted afterward, he was “constantly cock-eyed.” He would stay up the whole night drinking, then sleep throughout the next day. He did no writing himself, nor did he plan to, because he had stockpiled eight weeks’ worth of columns before going off the wagon. Ellis Lardner, withdrawing as usual from his drinking, stayed out of the way and tried to live as separate an existence as she could decently manage.
To Dorothy’s dismay, the Lardner household was anything but quiet. There were four active children, not to mention friends and neighbors who seemed to be dropping in constantly. One evening when Herman Mankiewicz turned up, in a mood to barrel around the North Shore drinking and raising hell, Lardner proposed a visit to a popular speakeasy in Manhasset. Ellis chose to stay home. When Dorothy and her two companions arrived at Rene Durand’s restaurant, the smoke-filled bar was crowded with its usual clientele of big burly Irishmen. After a few drinks, Mankiewicz remembered he was once a marine and began to pick fights with some of the customers, until it was necessary for Lardner to nose in and extricate him from a fistfight. With some difficulty, he and Dorothy finally hauled him back to the house and put him to bed. The next day, after declaring that he had to hurry back to town to finish an article, Mankiewicz braced himself for the trip with a succession of highballs and did not leave until five o’clock. This was an ordinary day at the Lardners.
After a week, during which Dorothy had accomplished nothing, she decided it would be best to depart. Back in the city, she complained that her stay had been perfectly horrible. Ring had lured her to his home with the promise of privacy, but there he had pursued her all hours of the day and night so that finally she had been forced to leave, just to escape being seduced. She neglected to mention that she had found Ring’s advances flattering, just as she found him sexually attractive, and that she had left the Lardner house only after she had slept with him. Before long, her indiscreet remarks were reported back to Ellis Lardner, who considered them unkind repayment for her hospitality.
Long afterward, when Ring was dead, she told practically every one of her close friends that she once had been his mistress, which may have been a genteel term to describe what had gone on between them, but also was a considerable embellishment of what was really a midsummer diversion. At the time, emotionally involved with Taylor, she probably had chalked it up to drinking and proximity and the sort of carousing that went on in Great Neck during the season. Lardner had been drunk her entire stay, but Dorothy also knew what everyone else knew—that, despite his great devotion to Ellis, he liked to chase other women.
Soon after her return from Great Neck, the relationship with Taylor began to improve, perhaps because Mary Taylor had gone to Europe and left the field clear. Taylor was spending the summer near Stamford, Connecticut, where he and his wife owned a farm. He was busy composing a tone poem, Jurgen, which was based on a satirical novel by James Branch Cabell and which had been commissioned by the New York Symphony for an autumn premiere. Dorothy visited him and stayed the rest of the summer even though rural life held no appeal for her. The small tumbledown house, which the Taylors intended to restore as a summer home, was still primitive. It lacked electricity, plumbing, and a telephone, but had an abundance of wasps and poison ivy. She heard from Don Stewart, who had once borrowed the house to write, that a rat had bitten him on the nose while he was asleep. Nevertheless, it was largely a happy time for her and she managed to settle down to work. Whether as a result of the orderly regime or the example of Taylor’s labors, her state of mind grew less muddled during her residence at the farm.
Her original idea was to write about her family and to set the opening of the novel in her early life, perhaps in the period of her father’s marriage to Eleanor Lewis or possibly later at the time of his death, the two events that she considered of the greatest consequence. The first of these themes concerns a child of five, modeled on herself, who has been adopted by a wealthy childless couple. The mother is a terrible figure, an oblivious woman who is determined to squeeze all the life out of the child, not from misdirected affection but rather from her own gross character defects and her inability to love.
The second theme draws on her father’s last years. The Old Gentleman, as she calls him, lives with one of his two daughters, exploits her shamefully, and appears indifferent to the hardship he has brought into her existence. He is, admittedly, ill, but he also is excessively selfish and tyrannical. The mood of the writing is as somber as the mustard-colored wallpaper and the heavy, tapestried furniture in the daughter’s parlor. Other characters bear resemblances to Helen and George Droste and to Bert Rothschild and his wife, Tiny. There also is a sketch of Dorothy’s oldest brother, Harry. Unwilling to offend Bert or Helen, she took pains to disguise them. She added twenty years to her father’s age and made him eighty-four at his death. It almost seems as if the portrait drew from an even earlier time when her grandfather Thomas Marston had lived with the Rothschilds, but it is not likely that she actually remembered any details about this period.
After sitting all day at her typewriter, she felt entitled to spend her evenings drinking Scotch and socializing with Round Tablers who owned summer homes in the area. A short drive away was the ninety-seven-acre farm that Ruth Hale had purchased with her own money and named Sabine Farm, after Horace’s estate in the Sabine Hills outside Rome. The only word for Ruth’s place was squalid. The two-hundred-year-old house was a wreck, not at all like Deems’s home, where his skill as a carpenter had created at least a facsimile of civilization. Sabine Farm, recalled Ruth’s son Woodie Broun, “looked as Horace’s place must have looked after the Goths, Gauls, and Vandals had passed over it several times.” Dorothy, disgusted at the sight of a brown, worn-out toothbrush in the bathroom, had refused to acknowledge the possibility that Ruth might actually be using it to clean her teeth and insisted that it must be a broomstick she rode on Halloween. In addition to Ruth, Murdock Pemberton lived in a second house on her property, Heywood Broun had bought a place down the road, and Peggy Wood and John Weaver owned land in North Stamford.
One evening at Ruth’s, they were sitting around the fire drinking with actor Ed McNamara. Dorothy was talking about Deems when she saw a pack of rats come running out of the wall like Olympic gold medalists, pounce on something, and then speed away. Breaking off her story, she stiffened with horror. Although she loved all animals and could put up with the most eccentric behavior so long as a creature walked on four legs, she had never cared for rats and in fact feared them. When she looked over at Ruth and McNamara, they were paying no attention to the rats. They were just sitting there calmly and smiling as they waited for her to continue. A few minutes later, the rats again came sprinting toward her, until they were just a few feet away. She was sure they could not be real; on the other hand, she had not drunk enough to be experiencing the DTs. After she finished her anecdote, she said, “Does anyone but myself see giant rats in this room?”
Ruth and Ed had been planning to say, “What rats, Dottie?” but a glance at her stricken face changed their minds. They confessed that they had been summoning the famished rats by quietly tossing bread pellets against the wall.
Several times she visited New York to look after her business affairs. For a change she was making money. Close Harmony, after reviews that compared her to George Kelly, was now in its third month in Chicago and doing excellent business. In New York, Business Is Business could be seen at the Criterion Theatre with Beggar on Horseback. On one of her trips to the city, she ran into Eddie, whom she had seen little of since his return to Hartford. In a jubilant mood, he told her that he was making money in Wall Street and had in fact cleaned up seven thousand dollars during the previous week. When he insisted on buying her a gift, she agreed to accept a dog, a seven-week-old Airedale she took with her back to the farm. On another trip she bumped into Harold Ross, who was in a far from jubilant mood. He was struggling to keep The New Yorker going with a tiny, inexperienced staff and an office that had only one typewriter. In August, circulation fell to twenty-seven hundred copies. Ross said, “I thought you were coming into the office to write a piece last week. What happened?”
Dorothy replied, “Somebody was using the pencil.”
At the end of July, she was in the city to greet Benchley, who returned alone from Europe. In an unhappy, cranky mood, he complained about the sticky weather and wished he had remained in Cap d’Antibes with his family. Dorothy planned to stay for the weekend, just long enough for a reunion with her best pal, but she hung around until the following Wednesday. She attended a few shows, even though everything she saw looked stale, and she spent many hours at Tony Soma’s with Benchley, catching him up on her news and listening to his stories of good times in Paris with Don Stewart and a likeable friend of Stewart’s, a newspaper stringer by the name of Ernest Hemingway. At Tony’s one night, she learned that Frank Sullivan was struggling to find material for The Conning Tower while F.P.A. was on his honeymoon. She mailed him two poems the next day. “If you can’t use these, give them to some poor family,” she wrote Sullivan, who was greatly moved by her generosity because The Conning Tower paid nothing for verse.
On this trip, she spent time with Charles MacArthur, whose new girlfriend, Helen Hayes, was away on tour. After dining together one night, they made a circuit of the speakeasies, the consumption of innumerable highballs constituting an evening’s entertainment for both of them. As the evening progressed, they began to quarrel. Charlie, as Benchley later told his wife, “bawled the life out of her.” His condemnation proved more than she could bear, because the following day she hurried back to Stamford and told Taylor that she felt like killing herself.
Frank and Esther Adams, who had just returned from Italy, appeared on Saturday and insisted that she go for a drive with them to visit actress Fay Bainter. Dorothy was in good form that afternoon. When Bainter expressed affection for her husband and mentioned that she had been married seven years, Dorothy replied, “Don’t worry, he’ll come back in style again.” Despite the jokes, she continued to feel depressed.
As the summer drew to a close, Dorothy was forced to acknowledge that her affair with Taylor had reached its conclusion because Mary Kennedy Taylor returned from Europe and Deems began to see her again. Appearing to accept this turn of events, Dorothy bowed out gracefully. Since she and the Taylors socialized in the same circles and could hardly avoid each other, their relations remained cordial. The following year the Taylors had a child, and their marriage survived until the mid-1930s.