The Last Days of Dorothy Parker Read online

  Meantime, her association with the New Yorker, the magazine she had helped make a success, seemed to be deteriorating. Harper’s Bazaar, which paid much better, would publish six stories, and soon she would also quit her popular New Yorker book column.

  Professionally, Dottie continued to win praise when critics commended her second collection of short stories, After Such Pleasures, in 1933. When she published another volume of verse – her last – three years later, reviews of Not So Deep As a Well were enthusiastic, and the Saturday Review cemented her status as poet and icon. She was, it said, “the wittiest woman of our time.”13 Dottie could care less what people called her because she was acutely aware of what she lacked. Success as a writer had brought disappointment; so had her wartime marriage to a Wall Street broker ensnared by alcohol and, eventually, morphine. Wed in 1917, when she and Edwin Pond Parker II were twenty-three years old, they had separated after five years.14 Her deepest longing was for real love, not the palaver of guys who scurried off to Long Island on Fridays. She had yet to meet a man who phoned when he promised to phone. Apparently, such a person did not exist. It was entirely possible she would spend the rest of her life alone.

  Long I fought the driving lists,

  Plume a-stream and armor clanging;

  Link on link, between my wrists,

  Now my heavy freedom’s hanging.15

  Back on the Times Square social circuit, operating on automatic pilot, she was soon drinking too much and taking up with boring dispensable men. She had grown to hate the parties but disliked being alone even more, so luckily there was no shortage of invitations. In literary circles you did not throw a party without inviting Dorothy Parker; she might not show up, but she was always invited. The fall of 1932, S. J. Perelman happened to be at a cocktail party when Dottie made a theatrical entrance that he would never forget. As befitted one of Manhattan’s all-stars, she was tricked out in a soigné black Lanvin outfit, feathered toque, and opera-length gloves, and immediately made every woman in the place look like a frump. Her condition, as he charitably described it, was “visibly gassed.”16

  Only a year earlier, during the holidays, she had showed up at a similarly elite gathering, at the home of William Rose Benet. A popular poet and editor, founder of the hugely influential Saturday Review of Literature, Bill Benet had been the husband of Dottie’s dear friend Elinor Wylie. A widow for three years, Bill was planning to remarry and the celebration brought out a crowd of prominent well-wishers. Dottie charged over to an author whose latest novel, The Glass Key, she had praised in her book column. Dashiell Hammett was “so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn,” she wrote. He was “as American as a sawed-off shotgun.”17 Seldom did such extravagant compliments occur in her column, but she loved Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon and meeting the mystery writer in person made her sink to her knees in playful homage. It is more than likely that she was “visibly gassed,” but her foolery made Hammett laugh.

  Dottie knew nothing at all about Hammett’s glowering girlfriend, perhaps did not even notice her. In that clubby crowd, any outsider would be counted of little consequence. Lillian Hellman – Lil Kober, as she was known – was the wife of Arthur Kober, a minor screenwriter, and seemed destined for obscurity. When the women next met the situation would be strikingly different, changed in ways that neither of them could have imagined.

  •

  Tony’s was her clubhouse, and almost every night, often in the company of Bob Benchley, she liked to stop by before heading back to the Algonquin. One evening in the spring of 1933, the two of them were ordering a nightcap when in walked an actor and would-be writer who occasionally published pieces about the theater in the New Yorker. The exchange was nothing special, merely a nod and a smile, because Bob knew the man just to say hello and Dottie paid no attention to him at all. But several months later she stumbled upon him again, at the home of lyricist Howard Dietz, and they hit it off right away.

  Alan Campbell was a quick-witted young man of twenty-nine who was born in Richmond and majored in civil engineering at Virginia Military Institute. He had jaunty manners and the kind of blond clean-cut looks that are almost too pretty for a man, so he came across as gay to some folks. But Alan was partial to the opposite sex, and he immediately made a play for the diminutive Mrs. Parker. He actually preferred older women, in some cases considerably older, and had once lived with the English actress Estelle Winwood, two decades his senior.

  Unlike some of her previous boyfriends, Alan felt privileged to be in Dottie’s company. He did not find her especially demanding or her celebrity intimidating but simply accepted that she was an A-lister and he wasn’t. A person of her stature should not have to worry about dragging around a vacuum cleaner or changing lightbulbs; in fact, not the smallest mundane task would he expect of her. A caretaker, a fussbudget with a talent for professional management, he set to work imposing order on her life. Initiating a self-improvement program of sorts, he supervised the purchase of a new wardrobe, rejuvenated her makeup, and talked her into a smart coiffure – and encouraged her to tone down the drinking. Here was a man, it was plain to see, who wished to mother her, and she was glad to be mothered.

  She had a habit of joking that all she required in a man was good looks and stupidity, the type of fellow who might get lost in an elevator. Alan was no numbskull, but neither was he macho competitive. Eager to please, he was willing to stand behind the superstar and hold her coat.

  Almost nobody took the romance seriously. It was whispered that Alan had planted himself in Dottie’s life and coddled her as if he were training a prizefighter; nastier comments deemed him a mediocre actor in search of a meal ticket. If the snide remarks bothered Dottie, she didn’t let on. Photos taken around that time show her looking girlishly young and terrifically happy. As she had once written, and half meant, overachievers drove her up the wall.

  People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;

  God, for a man who solicits insurance!18

  Alan was not cut out for a career in insurance. Regrettably, his future in the theater was beginning to look pretty wobbly too. There were small roles in a dozen Broadway shows, among them hits like Show Boat and Design for Living, but he himself was worried. He could not play juveniles forever. His final appearance on Broadway was in a Philip Barry comedy, The Joyous Season, which closed after sixteen performances. After that, except for a season of summer stock, he retired from acting. Alan was adaptable.

  Nobody expected her to fall in love with Alan Campbell, least of all Dottie herself who did not believe in happy endings. And yet, it was really not so strange after all because they had similar tastes and prejudices, and he also had a self-deprecating sense of humor that made her laugh. Even their family backgrounds – both had Jewish-Gentile parents – were comparable. At a Bowery tattoo parlor, they had matching blue stars put on the insides of their upper arms.

  What was plain to all, even those baffled by the unconventional pairing, was the pleasure they took in each other’s company. They were “absolutely right for each other,” recalled their friend Wyatt Cooper who added, in remembrance of their squabbling, “probably they were too right for each other.”19

  Based on past experiences with younger men, Dottie could be fairly sure that Alan Campbell was going to disappoint her, no matter how right he appeared. There was an eleven-year difference in their ages. Eventually he would cozy up to a Kewpie doll, somebody his own age who needed looking after. So what is a smart, beautiful, liberated woman to do?

  She married him.

  Chapter 2

  Beverly Hills

  (1934–1935)

  In the fall of 1934, Dottie and Alan arrived in Hollywood hoping to begin new careers as screenwriters. The reason was simple: big money. In the fifth year of the Depression, when the average American felt fortunate to take home perhaps thirty-five dollars a week, writers were flocking to the movie studio
s that paid hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

  On the street one day, Dottie passed a Cadillac that seemed to stretch a block long. Reaching out the side window emerged “a wonderfully slinky mink and an arm,” she would remember, and when she looked carefully noticed “at the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled at the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it.”20 She couldn’t see the woman’s face inside the car, or come close enough to smell the slippery leather upholstery or her French perfume, but all that was not hard to imagine, not in that neighborhood. The scent of money hung in the air of Beverly Hills, an architectural theme park of pretend Italian villas and Swiss chalets, each with a manicured, sprinkler-watered lawn and rectangular pool painted turquoise.

  Where ranchers used to raise lima beans and herd sheep now stood streets fringed by palms and eucalyptus, the avenues named Rodeo and El Camino, Roxbury and Linden. At 520 North Canon Drive, the Campbells rented a white, L-shaped American Colonial Revival with three bedrooms, four baths, and a lush backyard that had a pool as well as a guesthouse. Immediately Dottie began stocking the place with animals, adding to their pair of Bedlington terriers a dachshund puppy named Fraulein and some kind of Welsh terrier, perhaps half German shepherd, who answered to Scrambles. While dogs came first, because too many were never enough, she was thinking it might be nice to have a baby.

  To Dottie, the movie capital seemed like a foreign country full of exotic sights, home to people with piles of money but no taste. Of course the whole place was frightfully silly, nowhere you wanted to be stuck forever, and she agreed with her friend Sid Perelman who mocked the studio chieftains as “beetle-brained wind-suckers.”21 Then again, how could anyone dislike a city whose streets were paved with Rolls-Royces? “I love having a house,” she confessed to friends back East, “I love its being pretty wherever you look.”22 Alan, adept at home decorating, was in his element. Dottie, never a worshipper of Mother Nature, discovered that she loved freshly cut grass and birdsong. Above all, she loved the paychecks because, for the first time in her life, she could spend freely. The problem was screenwriting, which she hated “like holy water.” On the other hand, she was filthy rich and owned four dogs.

  •

  The carved pillars of Paramount’s archway loomed over Bronson Avenue like a majestic relic from ancient Rome. Built in 1926, the gateway provided a reminder that the studio was the largest in Hollywood, its historic roots extending back to the first feature film, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man. Through its wrought-iron gate had passed legends past and present: Valentino and Swanson, Mae West and Marlene Dietrich, and the Marx Brothers. Despite the glamour, Paramount in the midthirties was in reality a factory whose facilities included twenty soundstages for the manufacture of assembly-line entertainment. Along with the stars and contract actors, the studio employed mobs of bit players and extras, and an army of skilled technicians: cutters, cameramen, set designers, sound engineers, among dozens of other specialists behind the scenes. Ranked below all these came the “schmucks with Underwoods,” meaning the writers, as one studio chief liked to call them.23 Some one hundred schmucks were working for Paramount at the time.

  Marketing themselves as a team, the Campbells signed on for $1,250 a week ($1,000 for Dottie, $250 for Alan) and threw themselves into their first assignments: cooking up uncredited dialogue for a handful of stinkers followed by an adaptation of a Faith Baldwin novel, The Moon’s Our Home, on which they shared credit with three other writers. The pictures were formula romantic comedies, typical of the thirties, studded with clichéd characters that one day would become a staple of countless television sitcoms.

  With hindsight, Dottie would recognize Hollywood money as not money at all. Like a snowball, it melted in your hand before you knew it. In the real world of 1934, a loaf of store-bought presliced white bread cost around ten cents. Their weekly salary could buy roughly 12,500 packages of Wonder Bread.

  A visitor from New York was astonished to find her on easy street. Over the course of a few months, she and Alan had begun a fine-art collection that included a Utrillo, no less, and a Picasso gouache. They had, John O’Hara reported in disbelief to Scott Fitzgerald, a “brand-new Picasso, a Packard convertible phaeton, a couple of Negroes, and dinner at the very best Beverly Hills homes.”24 Such grandiose surroundings, although not exempt from Dottie’s barbs, were a sharp departure from her cozy two-room suite at the Algonquin. In New York she had earned a comfortable if undependable living from her writings, enough to employ a part-time maid, but difficulty managing money sometimes left her in financial straits. Not anymore.

  That the men running the movie factories were bags of hot air was to be expected. Yet, she informed Aleck Woollcott, “there are some nice people here.”25 She was invited to lots of parties where she made friends with actors like Jimmy Cagney and Bing Crosby. There was no mention of Lillian Hellman.

  As Hellman would tell the story, they met socially shortly after she arrived in Hollywood, in December of 1934, probably at one of those ritzy homes mentioned by John O’Hara. Remembering their earlier encounter, and how her lover had behaved like an ass, Lilly spent the evening glaring at Dottie before deciding that the hostility was silly. After all, Dottie’s flirtatious vamping had been harmless. That night, the two began talking, and Lilly found herself laughing and thinking she was funny and genuinely nice, which was unusual because Lilly put little value on female friends. The twelve-year difference in their ages – Dottie’s forty-one to Lilly’s twenty-nine – didn’t seem important either. “I liked her,” Lilly would write later, “and we saw each other the next day and for many, many other good days and years until she died in June of 1967.”26 The “good days and years” would be very good indeed; the unmentioned bad days and years very bad. It was unclear which, in the end, would prove to be the most significant.

  •

  The week before Thanksgiving, new shows were opening on Broadway almost every night. At Maxine Elliott’s Theatre, typically home to the dramas of Shaw and Synge, was a debut work from an unknown playwright, which was rumored to be a shocker. It seemed peculiar that the author, surely a wunderkind, was a woman still in her twenties.

  On the evening of November 20, 1934, Lilly was sick from drinking. A two-day binge had left her severely hungover, and to keep from going off the rails she needed to drink some more. The wardrobe mistress was dispatched for another bottle of brandy. In the course of the performance, when she was not dashing outside to vomit, she huddled at the back of the theater. Afterward, at opening night parties, she continued drinking until the early reviews began trickling in. Then she knew that something good had happened and her play was going to be a hit.

  The Children’s Hour, which drew for inspiration on an 1810 court case that took place in Scotland, tells the story of a disaffected student at a girls’ boarding school who falsely accuses two teachers of being lesbians. As a consequence, the school closes and the teachers are deprived of their livelihood. This was strong meat for theater audiences at a time when any mention of homosexuality onstage was illegal in New York State, and several actresses had refused the roles.

  Scandalous subject aside, the production was significant for another reason: the sex of the precocious playwright. In those years of the early twentieth century, the American stage was dominated by Eugene O’Neill and Elmer Rice (along with Ibsen, Shaw, and Strindberg). The idea of a female playwright was far-fetched but not completely unknown. Deemed first-rate were Zoë Akins and Susan Glaspell (a Pulitzer Prize winner for Alison’s House); the most commercially successful was Edna Ferber who, with George S. Kaufman, wrote such light comedies as The Royal Family and Dinner at Eight. Nonetheless, Lilly was greeted as something of a novelty.

  First-night jitters did not entirely account for her frantic consumption of alcohol though. Compounding her panic was rage. On the most important night of her life – the moment her real career began – the man s
he loved was as far from her as he could get. There was no phone call, let alone a congratulatory wire, and she was livid.

  It was Dashiell Hammett who had first read about the school closed by a lesbian scandal and decided the case might make an interesting play. Initially he thought of dramatizing the material himself but eventually handed it over to Lilly. While she was getting the hang of stagecraft, he logged endless hours of writing and rewriting, assuming the role of critic, shaper, and editor through a half-dozen drafts. Because Lilly was a diligent student, the upshot of all this was a well-made drama. Three weeks before the premiere he set off for Hollywood, to work on a sequel to The Thin Man, a popular film based on his most recent novel, and there he embarked on a weeklong binge. On the night of November 20, when she desperately needed him to hold her hand, he was a continent away and apparently content to let her sink or swim.

  By this time Lilly understood that Hammett was essentially undependable, a man who brought pain to anyone who loved him. Still, this was intolerable.

  Four years before the Broadway opening, she had been Mrs. Arthur Kober living in Hollywood with her husband and looking to escape her life. Nothing much of importance had ever happened to her. Just twenty-five, she hungered to become a writer but had no confidence whatsoever, not knowing how to go about it or even a vague idea of what to write. Then she crossed paths with Hammett.

  Their first meeting, in the fall of 1930, was unplanned. Certainly she knew of his novels and his personal reputation as “the hottest thing in Hollywood or New York,” but there was no conscious angling to seek him out.27

  One evening at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, attending a Bing Crosby opening with her husband and a party of friends, she spotted a tall, slender, expensively dressed man striding toward the men’s room. With his shock of prematurely white hair, he cut a distinct figure.