DOROTHY PARKER 1893-1993
[Commissioned
by “Vanity Fair” for the DP centenary -- not published when Alan Rudolph’s
“Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle” bombed that year. Later adapted (1995) for “Forbes FYI” under
the title THE TWO DOROTHYS]
Everyone's wondering what
Dorothy Parker would say if she knew that her face was on a postage stamp --
something about being “licked,” probably, or “sold in sheets,” or “swapped by
collectors. “ In her heyday, it was said of Mrs. Parker that "the men were
in and out of her apartment like the mail" -- she would not have wanted
for jokes about the United States Postal Service's
"I'm a feminist,"
said Mrs. Parker, "and God knows I'm loyal to my sex, and you must
remember that from my very early days, when New York was scarcely safe from
buffaloes, I was in the struggle for equal rights for women." She's the only woman in America to whom a
whole volume of the Viking Portable Library is devoted, and she sells like
hotcakes (8th in line by official count) next to Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Jung,
Thoreau, Emerson, Poe and Joyce. It's
not bad for a woman who liked to describe herself as "just a little Jewish
girl trying to be cute."
The Post Office gets 30,000
letters a year asking that one or another celebrated American be honored with a
stamp, but it chooses, on average, only 25 or 30 subjects. Special issues don't circulate long, so, by
the time you read this, the Dorothy Parker 29-center, 10th in a series of
"Literary Arts" commemoratives, will be off the shelves and back in
the warehouse, available only by special order.
That would not surprise her. One
of her uncles went down with the Titanic,
and her view of the world, even in her rosy moments, was frankly suicidal:
I never see that prettiest thing --
A cherry
bough gone white with Spring --
But what I
think, "How gay `twould be
To hang me
from a flowering tree."
"I'm always this way
in the Spring," Mrs. Parker confessed.
"Sunk in Springtime: or Take
Away Those Violets." Not that any
other season was easier to bear. "YOU COME RIGHT OVER HERE
AND EXPLAIN WHY THEY ARE HAVING ANOTHER YEAR," she cabled Robert Benchley
one December 31st.
On August 20, to
commemorate the 100th anniversary of her birth, a weekend celebration of
Dorothy Parker’s life and career is scheduled to kick off at the Algonquin
Hotel in New York, where the Round Table was born in 1919 and where Mrs. Parker
is still remembered as the cleverest (and most lethal) of its writers and
wits. Four of her short stories have
been dramatized to music for a cabaret performance, and while the staff at the
Algonquin seemed uncertain at press time just how far the festivities might go,
there are sure to be readings, and tributes, and plenty of booze.
"Three
highballs," Mrs. Parker once said, "and I'm St. Francis of
Assisi." As a screenwriter in
Hollywood in the 1930s, she irritated Samuel Goldwyn with her stream of caustic
remarks.
"Wisecracks,"
Goldwyn complained. "I told you
there's no money in wisecracks. People
want a happy ending."
"I know this will come as a shock to you,
Mr. Goldwyn," said Mrs. Parker, "but in all history, which has held
billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy
ending." And with that she left the
room, leaving Goldwyn, for a moment, to ponder her words.
"Does anybody in here
know what the hell that woman was talking about?" he said.
Oh life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea,
And love is
a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am
Marie of Roumania.
Mrs. Parker would be a
century old on August 22, a hundred years and legends away from her birthplace
at West End, New Jersey. Her father, J.
Henry Rothschild, was a prosperous, Jewish, "dearly loathed" captain
of the garment industry in Manhattan; her mother was
"English-American" -- what they used to call WASP -- a former
schoolteacher who died when Dorothy was seven and left her confused, to say the
least, about religion and race. If she
ever wrote her autobiography, she said, she'd call it Mongrel. No matter: rather than tell her life story she’d cut her
throat with a dull knife.
"All those writers who
write about their childhood!" Mrs. Parker exclaimed. "Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you
wouldn't sit in the same room with me."
"What, then, would you
say is the source of most of your work?" an interviewer asked.
"Need of money,
dear." She sprang fully armed from
the Upper West Side to the pages of Vogue,
where, starting in 1916, she wrote ad copy, captions and whimsical verse
("When she was good she was very very good, and
when she was bad she wore this divine nightdress of rose-colored mousseline de soie, trimmed with
frothy Valenciennes lace"), and from Vogue to Vanity Fair, where she succeeded P. G. Wodehouse
as drama critic and first made her mark as the wittiest woman in New York. It was at Condé Nast that Mrs. Parker developed her matchless philosophy of
life ("I hate men. They irritate
me"), and here, too, reflecting on bitter experience, that she dreamed up
what is arguably the most famous couplet of the 20th century (she called it
"News Item"):
Men seldom make passes
At
girls who wear glasses.
Frank Crowninshield,
editor of Vanity Fair, had understood
"the need for more cheerfulness" in American life after World War I,
"for hiding a solemn face, for a fair measure of pluck, and for great good
humor." But he didn't count on Dorothy
Parker, who brought a new standard of impiety to magazine writing and whose
literary style -- personal, prejudiced, plaintive and quick -- came to
epitomize the irreverent decade of the 1920s.
Mrs. Parker was something new in the history of criticism: a lady with a loaded gun. She was the enfant terrible of the lost
generation, the “What-the-Hell Girl" of Madison Avenue and a few blocks
west.
"Sometimes I think it
can't be true," she protested one day in her theatre column. "There can't be plays as bad as
these. In the first place, no one would
write them, and in the second place, no one would produce them." She swore up and down that she loved a
success -- "You don't know what it means to me to be able to say a few
kind words about something" -- but she was lying, and was grateful for the
epidemic of Spanish `flu in 1918, which periodically closed the theatres and
"gave the managers something to blame things on." Mrs. Parker was always better at knocking
down than building up:
And though to good I never come --
Inseparable
my nose and thumb!
She was a tiny, dainty
figure, with enormous green eyes and an odd passion for dirndls, ribbons, and
bows on her shoes. "She wore a
feather boa that was always getting into other people's plates or was being set
afire by other people's cigarettes," says John Keats in You Might As Well Live (1974), the first
full biography of Mrs. Parker -- it was thought to be "the only boa that
ever molted." Under Prohibition,
with many other writers, Mrs. Parker could be found at the fashionable
speakeasies -- Tony Soma's, Texas Guinan's, or Jack
and Charlie's ("21") -- where she drank in the day as well as at
night and delivered the ne plus ultra of lame excuses when an
editor challenged her over a missed deadline.
"Someone else was
using the pencil," she said.
Editors were "idiots," and the staff at Vanity Fair, in Mrs. Parker's view, were "four young men who
go to pieces easily. Even when they're
in the best of health, you have to stand on their insteps to keep them from
flying away." When she left the
magazine in 1920, after "a long succession of thin evenings" at the
theatre, it was reputedly under pressure from Florenz
Ziegfeld and Billie Burke, the reigning king and
queen of Broadway, who were miffed at her blasphemous tone. Mrs. Parker was already becoming famous
around the country as one of the charter members of the Algonquin Round Table,
where, with Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, George
S. Kaufman, Heywood Broun, Alexander Woollcott,
Franklin P. Adams and a number of other lunchtime regulars, she sat day after
day, year after year till the `20s waned, drinking like a trooper and honing
her reputation for homicidal repartee.
"She would simply
sit," said Frank Case, the owner of the
Algonquin on West 44th Street, "now and then saying something at
which the others would laugh, and that was the end of it." Not for Mrs. Parker. "Why, it got so bad," she said,
"that they began to laugh before I opened my mouth." She was married at the time to the socially
prominent but perennially absent Edwin Pond Parker II, a Hartford dandy and
Wall Street broker whom she was rumored to keep in a closet (in more ways than
one) and who became, in her hands, one of the funniest characters ever to sit in
the literary wings. Her "little
husband" was accident-prone, Mrs. Parker explained -- forever falling down
manholes, sliding under a bus, or breaking his arm while sharpening pencils.
"I married him to
change my name," she insisted, but there were those who said that she
loved Parker and regretted their eventual divorce ("in Connecticut, where
you can get it for roller-skating").
Between marriages, she revealed a penchant for pretty-boy models and
angry young men -- "I require three things of a man," said Mrs.
Parker. "He must be handsome,
ruthless, and stupid" -- and no comprehension whatever of a later age’s
“correctness.”
"We were gallant, hardriding and careless of life," she
recollected. "We were little black
ewes that had gone astray." Once in
Hollywood, while dating a playwright with a perfect tan, she remarked behind
his back, "He has the hue of availability." It might have been this same boyfriend,
grouchy with drink, who rose from the table at a party one night and mumbled,
"I gotta piss."
"He's shy," Mrs.
Parker explained. "He really has to
use the telephone, but he's too embarrassed to say so." At parties, for years, "fresh young
gents" followed her around to demand that she say something funny. Frequently she complied, as when, one night,
a drunk kept pawing at her to tell her how talented he was.
"Look at him,"
she agreed, "a rhinestone in the rough." She was "`the verray
parfit, gentil knight' of
the squelch," said the New York
Times. Her mastery of the put-down
has never been equaled:
You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think.
That woman speaks eighteen
languages and can't say No in any of them.
I should have stayed home
for dinner. I could have had something
on a tray. The head of John the Baptist
or something.
[On a book she was reviewing]: It was written without fear and without
research.
[On her second husband, Alan Campbell]:
Don't worry about Alan. Alan
will always land on somebody's feet.
[The same]: I don't know where Alan
is; he just pulled two boards up out of the floor and went to the post office.
[On meeting the daughters of Jimmy and Dinah Sheean, aged 3 and 6, shy and dressed for company]: A pity they never married.
[On pundit Dorothy Thompson, with whom she was frequently confused]: Well, of course, she realizes that she
doesn't know as much as God; but I suppose she does feel that she knows as much
as God knew when He was her age.
[Staring intently at a gentleman's fly]: Which side does it open on?
[On Elmer Rice]: Without
question the worst fuck I ever had.
Her speech was awash with
four-letter words, which she pronounced in a sweet, sugary, breathless voice,
her eyes as round as tea-time saucers, her air of innocence undisturbed by a
string of profanity. "She talked
like a woman who as a little girl had attended a very good singing
school," said one of her friends.
"That was what made her use of the words `fuck ‘and `shit’ so
amusing, because you simply did not expect it." Many of Mrs. Parker's sharpest lines have
been lost forever in the general modesty, but, among those that survive, an
awful lot are about sex.
"One more drink and
I'd have been under the host," she quipped, remarking further about a
hunky paramour who had dumped her, "His body went to his head." (Another died of tuberculosis: "I don't see what else he could have
done.") She kept a parrot called Onan ("because he spilled his seed upon the
ground") and once returned from a transatlantic crossing to say that the
seas had been so rough the only thing she could keep on her stomach was the
first mate. Not just people, but dogs
were the object of her libidinous humor.
She worshipped dogs, and when one of hers -- it might have been
"Amy," or "Woodrow Wilson," or "Poupée
Parker" -- came down with mange, she whispered to her friends, "He said he got it from a
lamppost." All dogs were
"he" in Mrs. Parker's eyes:
"It don't do to notice everything." There was a Hollywood producer of her
acquaintance who didn't have "sense enough to bore assholes in wooden
hobbyhorses;" a drunken maid whom she called "a tower of
Jell-O;" a group of wealthy friends on Long Island whose "pooled
emotions wouldn't fill a teaspoon;" and, of course, Clare Boothe Luce, whose triple-decker name sounded to Mrs.
Parker "like the motto of a girls' school." She had heard that Mrs. Luce was "an
outspoken hostess."
"Outspoken by
whom?" she wondered. The famous
story of their encounter in a doorway at the Algonquin (although Mrs. Luce
denied it to the grave) has won a permanent place in American legend.
"Age before
beauty," Mrs. Luce proposed.
"Pearls before
swine," Mrs. Parker replied. So
many lines attached to her in passing that she had a hard time herself
remembering which were hers and which were not.
"She never in her life
repeated her own witticisms," said Lillian Hellman,
her best friend and literary executor, "perhaps sure that other people
would do it for her." Late in her
life, tired and embittered, Mrs. Parker denied "almost everything"
attributed to her, but it's certain that she said of Calvin Coolidge, when she
heard he had died, "How can they tell?" and that Uta
Hagen received a telegram before a New York premiere: "A HAND ON YOUR OPENING AND MAY YOUR PARTS GET
BIGGER." Mrs. Parker was especially clever when
pulverizing divas of the stage and screen.
Fanny Brice, a well-known convert to plastic surgery, had "cut off
her nose to spite her race." Marion
Davies, the under-talented mistress of William Randolph Hearst, had only
"two expressions, joy and indigestion." Katharine Hepburn, appearing in The Lake, "ran the whole
gamut" of emotions, "from A to B." ("I'm happy to be the cause of
laughter," Miss Hepburn replied when I asked her how it felt to be the
butt of such a famous joke, "even at my expense. Just laugh.
That's important.")
In 1934, Mrs. Parker went
to Hollywood with her second husband, the writer Alan Campbell -- they were
working on a new "screen epic," she said, Lassie Get Down -- and discovered how difficult it was to keep a sense
of humor in a town where the flowers smelled like "old dollar bills"
and she felt "like the Little Colonel, only crosser."
"I can't talk about
Hollywood," she later declared.
"It was a horror to me when I was there and it's a horror to look
back on. I can't imagine how I did
it. When I got away from it I couldn't
even refer to the place by name. `Out
there,' I called it." In 1937, she
and Alan Campbell were nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay of A Star Is Born, and altogether they
worked on more than twenty scripts in Hollywood (including Hitchcock's Saboteur, in which Mrs. Parker made a
cameo appearance). But her heart was
never in Los Angeles, "this lotus-laden shore,/ This Isle of
Do-What's-Done-Before." She was
dumb with admiration in 1941, when Budd Schulberg
published his satire on the studio system, What
Makes Sammy Run? and “hit the hammer with the nail,” as Goldwyn might have
said.
"I never thought
anyone could put Hollywood -- the true shittiness of
it -- between covers," Mrs. Parker explained. The story is told of her leaning out a window
at M-G-M -- "Metro-Goldwyn-Merde" -- and shouting at the passersby, "I'm as
sane as you are!" She was
desperate, in the end, to be remembered for something substantial. In 1937 she went to Spain to report for The New Masses on the fight against
Franco. She was a committed if vaguely
defined Socialist, and for most of her life, despite her reputation as an
"Algonquin wit," she identified with leftist causes. Mrs. Parker was a founder, in Hollywood, of
the Screen Writers Guild and the Anti-Nazi League, and when she was blacklisted
during the McCarthy era, she commented, "Well, well, well, that's the way
it is.... I haven't the faintest idea about the politics of Hollywood, and you
make me laugh when you speak of them."
"I'm not being a
smart-cracker," she told the Paris
Review in 1957, a little the worse for drink. "You know I'm not when you meet me --
don't you, honey?" Her political
activism, while undoubtedly naive, was sincere, and she had suffered enough in
her private life to speak with authority on the sand-traps of the heart. Alan Campbell was homosexual ("queer as
a goat," Mrs. Parker said cruelly, "Betty Boop
going down for the last time"), and though this in itself can't account
for the breadth of her eventual complete frustration, it can't have helped her
any, either:
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.
But even here she felt
slighted, and wondered if history would judge her as a serious poet. At a reading in New York, Dame Edith Sitwell recognized her in the audience one night and took
the opportunity to salute "your grett Ameddican pwettess, Miss Doddothy Wadden."
"`Wadden'!
for Christ's sake!" Mrs. Parker complained. "Why, that goddam
limey -- !" She wrote her verses in
classical mode -- ballads, sonnets, Horatian odes --
but with a sharp and rueful edge, a twist of cynicism and a pound of
disappointment that distinguished her for all time from her
contemporaries. When she turned her hand
to fiction, as she did more and more in the post-Algonquin years, she devised
two or three masterful short stories -- little miracles of paranoia -- that
will live forever in American literature:
"Big Blonde" (which won the O. Henry Prize in 1929), "A
Telephone Call," and "Glory in the Daytime," the account of a
star-struck clubwoman who affects to be intimate with a faded, alcoholic
actress. Mrs. Parker was compared many
times to Ernest Hemingway, her all-time idol -- in her ear for dialogue, in the
terseness and precision of her prose, but also, significantly, in her
sentimentality. Like Hemingway, she
never got over a certain romantic discontentment, a longing for the Beautiful,
the True and the Real, which she nevertheless attempted to undercut at every
turn with open contempt for her emotions.
Her weepy women, her lying men, her smart and sour view of a useless
jockeying for position -- these are the things, apart from wit, that Dorothy
Parker is remembered for.
"In her stories,"
says John Updike, "she captures the voice, above all, of
neediness." In her later years,
divorced, remarried, then separated from Alan Campbell, she wrote beautiful,
lyrical, un-producible plays -- The Coast
of Illyria and Ladies of the Corridor -- taught literature (after a fashion) at
California State College, reviewed books for Esquire, and collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, Hugh Wheeler,
Richard Wilbur and Lillian Hellman on the original
script of Candide. Asked what she did "for fun," she
replied, "Everything that isn't writing is fun." She had "enough problems," she once
said, "without getting my forehead all over lines with dithering over the
English language." In the late
1960s Gloria Vanderbilt's husband, Wyatt Cooper, tried to get her to work on
her memoirs, but Mrs. Parker wasn't up to it.
"Through long,
difficult and often dreadful years," said one of her friends, "in
case anyone in or out of the charmed circle does not know, the events leading
up to the end were swamped in drinking, liquor, alcohol and booze." She died in New York in 1967, and, in a final
stab at militancy, left her entire estate to Martin Luther King, from where it
passed, on Dr. King's death, to the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People. Today, Mrs. Parker's
ashes lie in the Dorothy Parker Memorial Garden at NAACP headquarters in
Baltimore, beneath a plaque she could scarcely have envisioned:
TO HER NOBLE
SPIRIT WHICH CELEBRATED THE ONENESS OF HUMANKIND, AND TO THE BONDS OF
EVERLASTING FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN BLACK AND JEWISH PEOPLE
"You can't take it
with you," Mrs. Parker remarked, "and if you did it would probably
melt."
***
I asked a number of women writers,
all of them currently in media flower, what the name of Dorothy Parker means to
them now, on the eve of her centenary.
Gloria Steinem, who interviewed Mrs. Parker for The Ladies' Home Journal in 1965, remembers her as "a great
truth-teller," and adds that she was "generous to an unknown
writer" -- Steinem -- at a time when neither of them wanted to be
associated with women's magazines. Helen
Gurley Brown, on the other hand, who met Mrs. Parker in 1962 after the
phenomenally successful publication of Sex
and the Single Girl, thinks she was "an early Cosmo Girl, in her way,
because she took everything she had and made the most of it." ("She also had affairs," says Mrs.
Brown, who is known to recommend them.)
And Anna Quindlen of The New York Times -- who has stated more than once in her
prize-winning column that her heroines, growing up, were "the two
Dorothys, Parker and Thompson" -- says she finds it "hard to believe
there was ever a smart, ambitious girl" of her generation in America
"who couldn't recite some of Dorothy Parker's most wonderful
lines." For Quindlen,
"she epitomized that sophistication I wanted so desperately."
So why have all her
biographers concluded that her life was a disaster, a waste, and a tragedy pure
and simple? Quindlen
talks about an awful "sadness at the center of it," while Nora Ephron, echoing the judgment of our know-it-all age, writes
in Crazy Salad that Dorothy Parker
"misspent her life and her talent."
Ephron had "nothing to add" to this,
either, when I called -- it's a terrible time to be a literary legend in
America. The most recent and best
biography, Marion Meade's Dorothy
Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (1988),
takes its hilarious title from Mrs. Parker's habitual response when the
telephone rang ("It wasn't funny," said Jimmy Sheean;
"she meant it"), but Meade is squarely in the line of the psychic
deconstructionists, portraying Mrs. Parker as a weepy, raunchy,
"in-denial" pain in the ass, her humor born of shame and
self-loathing, her internalized anti-Semitism – oh, never mind: It's not the first thing her friends
remember, and it's not the message of her life.
"There must be
courage," Mrs. Parker observed when she talked about writing humor;
"there must be no awe. There must
be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild
mind. There must be a magnificent
disregard for your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you
can do about it." Alcoholism? Lousy love affairs? Suicide attempts? There were four in all, and after one of
them, in 1925, Mrs. Parker tied huge black ribbons to her bandaged wrists and
asked if she could have a flag for her oxygen tent. The various epitaphs she composed for her
gravestone -- "Excuse My
Dust," "This Is On Me," and "If You Can Read This, You've
Come Too Close" -- are as famous now as her sex-talk was, but how many
people know that she also wanted to be buried "in a shroud made of unpaid
bills from Valentina?" And why is humor regarded as a minor achievement in the arts?
"The only funny person
Americans agree to take seriously is Mark Twain," says Fran Lebowitz, the author of Metropolitan
Life and other tales of comic distress that make her comparison with Mrs.
Parker inevitable. Lebowitz
grew up in Morristown, New Jersey, where Dorothy Parker went to finishing
school (if you can believe it); she had read the entire Portable Parker by the time she was eleven, and "couldn't
believe how good it was."
"That's never changed
for me," says Lebowitz. "It wasn't like my discovery of MAD magazine, which was really my
introduction to satire. Eventually I got
beyond MAD. But I never got beyond Dorothy Parker,
because -- because you can't. Does
anyone know how hard it is to be that funny?
It's the easiest thing in the world to get people crying. All you have you do is say `Boo!' and there
are floods of tears." Recently Lebowitz wrote the introduction to a short biography of
Mrs. Parker in Italy, Gaia de Beaumont's Scusate le ceneri, which translates literally as
"Forgive My Ashes" but means "Excuse My Dust." Italians quote Dorothy Parker all the time,
as do Frenchmen, and hairdressers, and taxi-drivers, and sales clerks. Hers was no small existence. This is no minor legacy.
"Read her book
reviews," Lebowitz says. "Read them now and see how good they
are. What could be more insubstantial
than a popular novel of fifty years ago?
And yet you can read one of Dorothy Parker's reviews in Esquire or The New Yorker or Vanity Fair
and they're just so funny. They are so smart! It is so hard to do that!"
In Fredericksburg,
Virginia, Florence King, whose fortnightly column in The National Review, "The Misanthrope's Corner," carries
on bravely in the Parker tradition, adds for the record that "you can
pretend to be serious, but you can't pretend to be witty, and if you need that
explained to you you've missed the point."
King is the author of Reflections
in a Jaundiced Eye, Lump It or Leave It and the marvelous Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. She's a ferocious conservative, too, the
only hope, I'd say, for the Republican right wing, and she excluded Dorothy
Parker from her recent history of misanthropy, With Charity Toward None, on the grounds that Mrs. Parker was
"a romantic masquerading as a cynic" and that she even, for a time,
contemplated having a baby. A classical
humorist, King insists, never mind a misanthrope, "doesn't like
children" and isn't "silly about men." Plainly, King has evolved very far from that
point, but she wouldn't mind being on a postage stamp herself, and when she
dies, she says, she's going to leave her money "to David Duke."
So there you are --
wisecracks. Happy birthday, Mrs. Parker,
and don't let them get you down. It's
the laughter we live for.