Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? Read online

  Her way of looking at life was incurably pessimistic. Confronted by the unknown, she immediately prepared for the worst. Ordinary occurrences—the doorbell or a ringing telephone—made her wonder “What fresh hell is this?”

  She was a married woman who insisted on being called Mrs. Parker and who was said to keep a husband few had seen in a broom closet and to practice free love. Scandalous stories of extramarital affairs and abortions persisted in circulating, but that was largely because she made no attempt to deny the rumors, since they were true. She called herself a slut and exclaimed to Edmund Wilson, “I am cheap—you know that!” The vigor with which she flaunted her sexuality offended more than a few people, among them Ernest Hemingway who composed a vicious poem about her. But she bestowed a royal raspberry on her critics one and all:But now I know the things I know,

  And do the things I do;

  And if you do not like me so,

  To hell, my love, with you!

  She was thirty-three—“Time doth flit. / Oh, shit!”—and declared that living had taught her two important truths: Never trust a round garter or a Wall Street man. She disdained the American obsession with money, hated the idea of owning property or stocks, and sought only enough money “to keep body and soul apart.” She preferred to live in a hotel, she explained, because all she needed was room to lay a hat and a few friends. She had visited everyplace worth visiting, from Hemingway’s favorite writing cafés on the Left Bank to the Long Island house parties Scott Fitzgerald memorialized in The Great Gatsby; she appeared to be acquainted with nearly every person worth knowing, possess every ware worth owning.

  In the golden age of “Ain’t We Got Fun,” a song she especially loathed, the country was entering its eighth year of Prohibition, and social pleasure was measured by alcohol. Having fun meant getting drunk. Having a lot of fun meant getting very drunk. By current standards, Dorothy was enjoying the time of her life. Her days and nights were packed with adventures tailor-made to fit the public’s fantasies about the New York literary high life and unfolded with fairy-tale predictability. At twilight, she called Algonquin room service to send up ice and White Rock, and her suite became the scene of an informal cocktail party, a ritual she called “having a few people in for drinks.” The few often swelled to several dozen, including Irving Berlin, Tallulah Bankhead, and Harpo Marx. No invitations were issued and everybody brought an offering from their bootlegger. Her personal taste ran to Haig & Haig, but she also was known to drink “White Hearse,” as she called all rotgut Scotch whisky, and practically anything in a pinch except gin, which, plain or mixed, made her ill.

  After the party broke up, she attended the theater with friends or lovers, sometimes one and the same, then swung uptown to Forty-ninth Street and her favorite speakeasy, where she met her best friend, Robert Benchley. In Tony Soma’s smoky basement, they sat at tables covered with white cotton cloths and drank right-off-the-ship whiskey from thick white coffee cups. There was no ventilation, no music, very little to eat except steak or chicken sandwiches. The club had no established closing hour. Only after the last patron had left, whether at 3:00 A.M. or 6:00 A.M., did Tony lock up.

  After downing two stiff highballs, Dorothy talked happily about how she would love to pick up a stray dog because she’d never owned enough dogs. “Three highballs,” she admitted, “and I think I’m St. Francis of Assisi.” On Sixth Avenue, she once kissed a cab-horse because he looked tired standing there, and she liked him. She announced that she’d kiss that horse again if she ever ran into him, even go to Atlantic City with him if he asked her. “I don’t care what they say about me. Only I shouldn’t like to have that horse going around thinking he has to marry me.”

  The surroundings in which she felt most comfortable were hotels and saloons, not necessarily in that order. There were thousands of speakeasies in Manhattan. Clubs lined the streets of the forties and fifties between Fifth and Sixth avenues, and Dorothy was a regular patron in a great many of them. Her nightly rounds often included such stylish drinking establishments as Texas (“Hello, suckers!”) Guinan’s, Club Durant, and Jack and Charlie’s. After the midtown clubs began to empty, she circled up to Harlem to hear jazz at the Savoy Ballroom, then sped back downtown to join Benchley for a nightcap at Polly Adler’s brothel before calling it a day.

  It was inevitable that sometimes she awoke suffering from what she termed the “rams” and felt scared to turn round abruptly for fear of seeing “a Little Mean Man about eighteen inches tall, wearing a yellow slicker and roller-skates.” She certainly was acquainted with the rams—as well as the less acute strain known as German rams—but had learned that the disease was never terminal. Usually she was able to trace its onset to a stalk of bad celery from last night’s dinner. At lunch, downstairs at the Round Table, she laughed and insisted that her hangover “ought to be in the Smithsonian under glass.” There was no possible way, she protested, that two or three sidecars, give or take a bottle of champagne, a couple of Benedictines, and Lord knew how many Scotches, could leave a person in such filthy condition.

  A few weeks earlier, in May 1927, Charles Lindbergh’s flight from Long Island to Paris presented the country with an old-fashioned hero. It was the type of heroism popular in the nineteenth century but out of style in the 1920s, which put no great store by heroes. That year Dorothy expressed the cynical spirit of the decade with these lines:Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is

  The gain of the one at the top,

  For art is a form of catharsis,

  And love is a permanent flop,

  And work is the province of cattle,

  And rest’s for a clam in a shell,

  So I’m thinking of throwing the battle—

  Would you kindly direct me to hell?

  In her verse rang the voice of the twenties, its hysterial insistence on having fun, its pretense that nothing was really worth believing in anymore. Two years later, all of that crashed along with the stock market.

  At the close of her life, Dorothy harshly portrayed herself as “just a little Jewish girl trying to be cute.” She was referring not only to herself at the Algonquin Round Table and her reputation as the country’s foremost female wit in the 1920s. Her memories had strayed back to a very different past, another incarnation almost, the distant years before she had transformed herself into Dorothy Parker. In the twenties, at the pinnacle of fame, her name was synonymous with sophisticated humor and a Times Square hotel, but she did not start out in this land of literary romance, nor did she end there.

  Chapter 1

  THE EVENTS LEADING UP TO THE TRAGEDY

  1893-1903

  One of her earliest memories was of ice-green water. She was hurrying toward the sea, then a sudden loop in the road revealed vast waves frothing lacily on the sand.

  And another memory: She was gazing out the window, content to watch the fall of the rain, when without warning her heart beat “wild in my breast with pain.”

  She was supposed to have been born in New York City, but instead she showed up prematurely at the seashore on August 22, 1893. That summer, as always, her family was living at West End, New Jersey. The Rothschilds had their routines. As soon as the children’s schools closed in June, they packed up household and servants and left the city. Henry Rothschild, who had his business to attend to, joined them on Sundays.

  They prided themselves on renting a house at West End, which was next door to Long Branch, a seaside resort that had been the favorite spa of presidents from Grant to Arthur and that presumed to call itself “the Monte Carlo of America.” West End, slightly less exclusive, was favored by the Guggenheims and other immensely rich Jewish families. (“My God, no, dear! We’d never heard of those Rothschilds!” as Dorothy was later to say.) Nevertheless, these Rothschilds knew the fashionable places to summer, and they had enough money to be among the select.

  They loved Cedar Avenue with its huge gingerbread houses, the swings and screened porches, everything that accompanied living
at the shore in summer. They ate big meals for breakfast, and before it grew too hot, they waded into the surf, taking care to obey the swimming flags, red for gentlemen, white for ladies. The water was always icy. Later they slowly promenaded along Ocean Avenue carrying parasols, strolling past the big hotels that had recently begun to charge four dollars a day, American plan, gawking at the casinos where derbied dice rollers and roulette spinners displayed gardenias in their buttonholes. They would not have dreamed of entering; they were not those kind of people. In the evenings, bands played Sousa marches and favorites from H.M.S. Pinafore . At West End, everybody attended the concerts. Nearly every day there was sailing and lawn tennis, and shore suppers at the beach—the best roasted clams, corn fritters with hard sauce, huckleberry pie, and it all tasted wonderful. That year a financial panic was battering the economy. In New York, on the Lower East Side, where the Rothschild money originated, people lined up on the sidewalks for free bread and soup. At the shore, people talked about the flies, but otherwise they had few complaints about their lives.

  On a weekend toward the end of August, a hard rain hit the shore. Water hurtled down in spears. The thunder blasted like fireworks. Trees were ripped up by the wind. By Monday morning, the storm had passed. Since the weather promised to be good, Henry Rothschild felt confident leaving his family to go back to town. Summertime was his busiest season.

  Shortly thereafter, Eliza Rothschild went into labor. The evening after the baby came, the shore was pounded by a West Indian cyclone that knocked the chimney off their roof; the flagpole cracked and crashed, and the walls rocked on their foundation. At any moment it seemed like the house would collapse and crush them. After a terrible night, the children ventured forth to discover that not a bathhouse was left standing on the beach, and the old iron pier had been washed out to sea like a sand castle.

  When Henry Rothschild returned to Cedar Avenue, he found a baby and a house that needed a new chimney.

  Dorothy’s paternal grandparents came from Prussia, swept across the Atlantic in the wave of German-Jewish emigration after the abortive 1848 revolution. Samson and Mary Rothschild, a couple in their twenties, were concerned about the future and were afflicted, as were so many others, by New World fever. They heard about the marvels of America and began to dream radiant dreams. Being rural people, they decided to bypass New York and to seek a small town where an ambitious young man could establish himself, where people had money to spend on quality goods. Samson and Mary settled in Selma, Alabama, where their first child, Jacob Henry, Dorothy’s father, was born in 1851. A few Jews lived in the area but none in Selma, which was primarily populated with English stock. Samson sold fancy goods—embroideries, laces, all the trimmings that Southern women treasured so highly. He peddled his finery by wagon. They had two more sons, Simon and Samuel. The Rothschilds learned to speak English with a southern accent, imitated the courteous manners of their neighbors, and suffered the anti-Semitic remarks that unthinking customers made.

  Samson worked tirelessly for ten years. He prospered to some extent, but he still felt restless, dissatisfied. He was nearly forty. A few southern Jewish merchants understood that war might be likely one day and formulated business strategies to their advantage. Whether Samson was equally farsighted or whether he simply became fed up with Selma is impossible to know. He packed up and moved his family to New York City in 1860.

  There being little demand for embroideries during the Civil War, Samson switched to men’s wear. By 1865, he was listed in the city directory as the proprietor of a “gents furnishings” store at 294 Broadway. Elsewhere in the city lived German Jews like August Belmont, who had changed their names, become rich men, and lived in absurdly ornate palaces on Fifth Avenue. Those were not the addresses Samson dreamed about. He felt lucky to move his family, now expanded by the births of Hannah and Martin, from Avenue B to sensible and better houses in East Thirteenth Street and then to pastoral West Forty-second Street. Based on his personal experience and immigrant faith, Samson believed that you get what you want by hard work. Like his biblical namesake, he was a hardy specimen, a proud, vigorous, physically strong man who lived into his eighties; even then it was his mind that first failed him, not his body. Armed with self-confidence, he had just the qualities suitable for earning his bread by persuasion fused with the flamboyance required to make a sale. The founding father of these “folk of mud and flame,’ as Dorothy called them, was undisturbed about “fiddling” for his dinner, however crude he may have seemed to subsequent generations.

  Samson’s eldest son had a personality similar to his own—hearty, aggressive, and industrious. Jacob Rothschild was smart and highly amibitious, but sometimes his ambitions tended to run along alarming lines. Jacob disliked his given name. During adolescence, he began calling himself Henry, his own middle name, which must have sounded more American to him. In the course of his life, his first name passed through several incarnations, but he never tampered with his surname. There may have been Rothschilds who were butchers, but others were lords and bankers. It was an aristocratic name. Everything else he inherited from Samson was open to the winds of revision.

  In 1868, the family rented half of a modest, two-family dwelling at 124 West Twenty-seventh Street, not far from stylish Madison Square, where the best stores and restaurants were located. Some months after the Rothschilds moved to the new house, the neighboring flat was occupied by a machinist named Thomas Marston, his wife Caroline, and their three children Eliza Annie, Frank, and Susan. Henry (né Jacob) Rothschild is recorded in the census taker’s book as eighteen years old. Eliza Annie Marston is nineteen. Living in the same house, seeing each other every day, they fell in love.

  Even to a romantic young woman, Henry’s religion must have presented an insurmountable obstacle. By the standards of both families, marriage was unthinkable. Eliza Marston had been born in 1851 into a family of highly skilled English gunsmiths. Although, in the twentieth century, certain Marstons decided that their forebears arrived on the Mayflower, the plain fact is that Eliza’s grandparents, Stanhope and Elizabeth Marston, came to New York in the late 1830s with three children and two of Stanhope’s younger brothers.

  This was not a family that went its individual ways. The men worked together, sharing what amounted to an obsession with firearms, lived in neighboring streets, and named their children for each other. As early as 1853, when Eliza was two, Stanhope and his brother William already held a number of important patents and had systematically set about making themselves rivals of Colt and Deringer. The Marstons manufactured percussion pepperboxes, pistols, and revolvers at a two-floor plant on Jane Street, where they employed 140 workers. That same year their breech-loading and self-cleaning rifles, on display at the Crystal Palace Exhibition, were greatly admired by Horace Greeley, who later visited Jane Street and wrote a glowing description of the Marston arms.

  If the Marston brothers had been no more than small-potatoes gunsmiths in England, they were destined to prosper in America. By the outbreak of the Civil War, they were making rifles and carbines for the government in an immense four-story factory on Second Avenue called the Phoenix Armory. To New Yorkers it was a familiar, visible landmark, too visible for the Marstons’ own good. In the summer of 1863, during the draft riots, a mob of some four thousand protesters aimed straight for the armory, shattered its windows with the biggest paving stones they could find, and finally forced the doors, despite the police squads assigned to its defense. When the armory went up in flames, most employees escaped through a rear entrance, but those cut off by the fire panicked and jumped to their deaths. The Marstons rebuilt the Phoenix Armory and continued to rake in wartime profits.

  Eliza’s father did not distinguish himself in the family business, despite his being Stanhope’s eldest son, his only son after the deaths of the two younger boys. Tom Marston worked at Phoenix Armory as nothing more than a machinist, possibly because, unlike his father and uncle, he lacked a technical gift for inventions. As a skille
d laborer he earned ample wages to exist comfortably and presumably had no higher aspirations. Tom and Caroline lived modestly, perhaps even frugally. Since rents were low and concessions of a month or two free rent common, nearly every spring they would pile their household goods on a cart and shuttle the family to a new flat, never far distant from the armory. Every morning Tom walked to his job, every evening he returned to Nineteenth Street or Thirty-second Street, or whatever street they happened to be living on that particular year. When his son Frank was nearly grown, he was duly apprenticed to a printer. Whatever the Marstons’ expectations for their daughters, they were not interested in a match with a German Jew. When the situation between Eliza and Henry Rothschild became too obvious to ignore, the Marstons took action to solve the problem. They moved.

  Eliza Marston was a young woman of iron will and independent mind. To be a single woman sentenced to spending the rest of her life with her parents or as a spinster aunt was unimaginable. She wanted marriage, children, and a home of her own, but she decided to forgo these experiences if they were not to be shared with Henry. She found a job teaching in a public school, not a usual step in her day.

  As the years passed, both Eliza’s brother and sister married and departed. She remained at home with her parents, outwaiting time and opposition. The summer of 1880, when she was nearly thirty, Eliza and Henry finally married.

  When Dorothy was a child, at West End and other summer resorts, she would ask new playmates, “What street do you live on?”; never, “What town do you live in?” It did not occur to her until much later that people might live elsewhere than in New York. Her favorite image of the city was seeing it in the rain, smelling with sensual pleasure the odor of wet asphalt, picturing the empty streets “black and shining as ripe olives.” Other places she lived would give her a sense of serenity, but New York meant uncertainty. She never knew what was going to happen next.