The Last Days of Dorothy Parker Read online

  “Who’s that man?” she asked.

  Learning it was Dashiell Hammett, she bounded out of her seat and went careening after him, close on his heels. Before he reached the john, she grabbed his arm and fell into step, chattering as she attempted to engage him in conversation.

  What Hammett saw was a reddish blonde–haired woman, bosomy, with thin lips and a large nose. A stylish wardrobe and a fast-talking manner did not obscure the fact that she was no goddess in the looks department.

  When he emerged from the toilet she was still there, running her mouth. Her brash personality amused him. Instead of going back to their tables, they wound up in the hotel parking lot, where they sat in the back of his car and talked until daylight.

  Hammett seemed under the weather. Unguarded, he confided that he was getting sober after a five-day drunk and felt lousy. Lilly later volunteered that they may have talked about T. S. Eliot. The rest she forgot or more likely wished to keep private. In the meantime, the Crosby floor show had ended, and Arthur Kober was left to return home without his wife.

  Lilly didn’t know the first thing about men like Hammett but soon found out: her easy conquest happened to be meaningless because Dash was not exactly a choirboy. He was the son of a Maryland tobacco farmer by birth, a school dropout at thirteen, addicted to alcohol, prostitutes, and danger, and because of a particular recklessness in his temperament, drawn to the life of a cop. By twenty, he was working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a private police force with a long record of brutality, whose men were thoroughly detested by organized labor as strikebreaking terrorists and bloody-handed cutthroats operating in dark corners. A wayward husband and father, he was already involved with two women: fiction writer Nell Martin and an aspiring movie actress named Elise De Viane. Then, too, he didn’t object to paying for sex and was known as a regular customer at Lee Francis’s sporting house; his promiscuity led to repeated doses of gonorrhea.

  If Dash put little stock in either fidelity or sobriety, there were other discoveries for Lilly: the former Pinkerton agent, like the tough-guy heroes of his fiction, turned out to have an ugly streak; he mistreated both men and women, but most of the time women. Soon after the night at the Hollywood Roosevelt, at a private party, he and Lilly got into an altercation, and he hauled off and slugged her. On several occasions there were black eyes. When he slapped around Elise De Viane during rough sex, she sued him for assault, but Dash, barely disguising his contempt, laughed about it. Why should he care? When the aggrieved Elise won $2,500 damages, he still didn’t care. Lilly, appalled at his behavior but besotted with the man, never thought of suing. She was not a crybaby. She remembered Dottie saying to her, “It can’t be news to you that Dash is a cruel man,” and she agreed but told herself it didn’t matter.28

  Hammett, however, had another side that made him exceptionally attractive. In addition to being an idealistic social critic, a late-blooming crusader for the downtrodden, he had distinguished himself in the field of detective fiction. Almost thirty, he attempted writing for pulp magazines, and by forty, everything he touched had turned to gold. In quick succession came five novels – Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man – galloping best sellers with such memorable characters as the Continental Op and Sam Spade. Known for his understated style, reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway’s, he was now on his way to becoming undisputed master of the genre.

  •

  Before meeting Lilly, Dash had spent almost two years with Nell Martin, to whom he had dedicated The Glass Key. Nell was a hardworking author of some two hundred stories and a half-dozen novels, inelegant lowbrow fare to be sure but nonetheless a woman not to be confused with a prostitute. Nevertheless, in Lilly’s mind, the rest of his women were bimbos and gum-cracking chippies.

  The morning after the premiere of The Children’s Hour, waking with a head-splitting hangover, she nevertheless felt triumphant and phoned Dash at his rented beach house in Pacific Palisades. The woman who answered said that she was Dash’s secretary. Wasn’t it an unusual hour to be calling?

  The whole conversation lasted about a minute but left Lilly seething. After hanging up she remembered that the time in California was 3 A.M. and so any woman who picked up Dash’s phone in the middle of the night must be sleeping there. Because she knew of no secretary (actually, he did have one), the mystery woman could only be one of his strumpets. She was familiar with Dash’s goatish sexual habits, involving both paid and unpaid partners – he once suggested a threesome, but she had the good sense to refuse.

  When writing in her memoir Pentimento about Dash’s absence and the numbing phone call, she talked about her humiliation, how she had flown to Los Angeles, rattled up blazing drunk at Dash’s house, smashed a soda fountain to smithereens, then hightailed it back to the airport and caught a night flight home.

  This tale of the pulverized soda fountain may or may not be true, but what is not in question is that barely three weeks after the premiere she surfaced in Hollywood, where she parked herself in Dash’s $2,000-a-month hotel suite at the Beverly Wilshire.

  These were heady days for Lilly. In the opinion of some critics, The Children’s Hour was the season’s outstanding play. A few months later, when the Pulitzer Prize went instead to Zoë Akins, they organized the New York Drama Critics Circle and bestowed their first award on Lilly. Impressive earnings from the play, which ran almost two years, enabled her to go hog wild and purchase a mink coat.

  •

  Lillian Florence Hellman, born June 20, 1905, in New Orleans, came from a Jewish family where her mother’s relatives were wealthy bankers and merchants, and her father was a shoe salesman whose sisters operated a boardinghouse. The great sorrow of her life, and a source of lifelong insecurity, would be her face. Mischievous genes, or perhaps just bad luck, denied her heart’s desire: ravishing natural beauty. Through no fault of her own, she was a plain child who wound up a plain young woman forced to struggle for minimal prettiness. Growing up, she winced whenever people remarked on her lovely hair, which meant “they couldn’t think of anything nice to say about my face,” she recalled.29 Although deeply identified as a Southerner, Lilly actually spent half of each year in New York City, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and attended a public high school for girls. As a pampered only child, she was not shy about promoting herself, sure that she was meant for stardom despite her ordinary looks. Since then, she had continued to demand, and often got, whatever she wanted.

  On the basis of her theatrical success, producer Samuel Goldwyn approached her about a movie contract and wound up offering an astonishing $2,500 a week. Not only was screenwriting a boys’ club, but this kind of money in 1934 was restricted to a handful of elite writers. By point of comparison, Dottie, together with Alan, was raking in a grand total of $1,250. Lilly was not fooling herself. If she had to work on drek, her favorite word for trash, she damned well wanted to be paid handsomely.

  Her first assignment was rewriting a tearjerker set during World War I, which in previous incarnations had been a Broadway play and before that a hokey silent film. To Lilly, The Dark Angel was “an old silly.”30 What’s more, her relationship with Goldwyn got off on the wrong foot because after several weeks, impatient with endless script conferences, she stormed back to New York, a tip-off that she would not be easy to work with. Goldwyn, as big an egotist as Lilly, was not particular fond of female writers, especially prima donnas, but he recognized a go-getter who could deliver high-quality scripts. He wooed her back. When The Dark Angel was released in 1935, with a stellar cast led by Fredric March and Merle Oberon, reviews were enthusiastic. As debuts went, it could have been worse.

  Her relationship with Goldwyn (a Polish-born glove salesman) would remain contentious, but nonetheless she ended up writing several more pictures for him, including adaptations of The Children’s Hour (released as These Three, 1936) and also the play that made her name, The
Little Foxes (1941).

  In the next few years, in addition to films, she tackled the class struggle in a play about a labor strike in small-town Ohio. Without the benefit of Hammett’s close supervision, she cranked out a dull melodrama peopled by cardboard characters. Days to Come, which opened in December 1936 and closed after just six performances, was pummeled by critics as “inept” and “muddled.”31 For Lillian, Days to Come was not only “an absolute horror of a failure” but a huge embarrassment.32 She rebounded quickly, but three years would pass before she returned to the stage with the play considered to be her biggest achievement, The Little Foxes. Priding herself on hard-won independence, she deliberately set about constructing a reputation as a woman who stood up for herself, a no-holds-barred gunslinger whose success rested on being good at what she did. She hungered for, and accepted nothing less than, the world’s admiration. In due course, she would get it.

  Though success could not bring the physical beauty she craved, public recognition had its compensations, allowing her to live on a grand scale. Controlling every aspect of her life was especially important to Lilly, and yet she had no control over Dash who “always had to have things on his own terms.”33 His most egregious betrayal was a brief fling with Laura Perelman, who with her husband Sid were close friends. For Lilly, that was particularly reprehensible. Still bitter decades later, she told a friend, “I wish he were alive, I could kill him for that.”34

  Other shortcomings of his were equally worthy of mayhem. Divorced from Arthur Kober, she was free to marry, even have children. Needless to say, this scenario was the furthest thing from Dash’s mind, and so a pregnancy in 1937 ended in abortion. For that matter, with their physical relationship pretty much over by 1935, the affair was running out of gas.

  While they continued to care for each other, it was a narrow definition of love that excluded marriage, family, passion, and fidelity. As always, he dictated the terms of their relationship. Refusing to put himself out on her account, he made no promises to stop drinking, divorce his wife, forgo prostitutes, or avoid gonorrhea. In self-defense, she had affairs with other men. Forced to let go, at least temporarily, she was adopting Dash’s cool hard-boiled style as she tried to remold herself into a she-Hammett, even if the original Hammett was not all that worthy of imitation.

  In the end, however, she would get the last laugh.

  Chapter 3

  FOREIGN LANDS

  (1936–1950)

  Seven years before going to Hollywood, in the heat of a Boston summer, Dottie got arrested. It was an afternoon she would never forget. Wearing an embroidered sheath, strappy high heels, and white gloves, a Hattie Carnegie cloche framing her face, she looked less like a protester than a Fifth Avenue shopper on her way to Henri Bendel. When police yanked her arms on Beacon Street she refused to enter the paddy wagon, walking briskly instead to the station house. There she was relieved of her cigarettes and bundled off to a cell, and the next morning she pleaded guilty to loitering and sauntering and paid a five-dollar fine. All this happened in August 1927, and ever after, she thought of it as the proudest moment of her life.

  Dottie would not get over the executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti,35 which set in motion beliefs that lasted to the end of her life. Feelings that emerged during the trial and sentencing of the Italian-American anarchists sent her to the city where she worked for the defense committee at its headquarters on Hanover Street and took part in the demonstrations on Boston Common. In a newspaper picture, she can be seen trailing John Dos Passos and singing “The Internationale” with an expression of haughty indifference to the crowds chanting “Red scum” and “Bolsheviki.” Later, Dottie gained admission to Charlestown State Prison, where she was said to have spoken to the condemned immigrants.

  The executions took about fifteen minutes. In the early morning of Tuesday, August 23, Sacco was marched to the electric chair at precisely 12:11 A.M. and pronounced dead at 12:19; Vanzetti entered the room a minute later and died at 12:26.

  When Dottie got back to New York, her suite was waiting at the Algonquin, and her friends were all sitting downstairs at the Round Table cracking jokes and ordering creamed chicken and popovers, as if nothing had happened.

  Nineteen twenty-seven was a good year to be an American. The most popular songs – “Let’s Misbehave” and “I Wanna Be Loved by You . . . Boo Boo Bee Doo” – reflected the nation’s emotions. Nearly everybody was pumped up as they watched the stock market pulse higher. Every Yankee Doodle Dandy believed in the American flag, everybody had confidence in the sanctity of Wall Street, and anybody who had a dollar invested it. Apart from money – making and flaunting it – the important thing was having fun. With all the giddy spending and cheating and carousing, the overdrafts and divorces and hangovers, nobody had time to think about trivialities and almost certainly not the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti.

  By the time fall came, Dottie soon resumed her normal life, writing a book column called “Constant Reader” for the New Yorker and wrapping up a second volume of verse, Sunset Gun. In short order, she began writing one of her best stories (“Big Blonde”) and finally ended her marriage to her first husband, Eddie Parker. There was an impassioned affair with an investment banker, the epitome of a right-wing reactionary, which may or may not have inspired a few lines in Cole Porter’s latest hit “Just One of Those Things.” (“As Dorothy Parker once said to her boyfriend . . .”) Calling herself a socialist, who refused to put a dime in the stock market, failed to impress her Round Table friends. To hold political views of any sort back then was unfashionable – Dottie had never voted – and besides, everybody was a capitalist.

  Over the years, she never spoke of the incident in Boston again, never wrote a word of it. Poor at managing her emotions in general, she kept quiet about Sacco and Vanzetti. But in 1927, she silently had become an unregistered anarchist.

  •

  It was now 1935, and the unthinkable had happened. The country was unraveling, and the dream of a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage – Herbert Hoover’s presidential campaign slogan in 1928 – had grown battered and broken. If the twenties had been a permanent party, the thirties was an anarchist’s banquet – the unemployment rate reached a shocking peak of 24.9 percent as more and more families were forced into poverty. What seemed evident to some, among them Lilly and Dottie, was that capitalism must surely be doomed. The answer lay in profoundly different political solutions.

  Speaking about herself and Dottie, Lilly liked to point out that they had absolutely nothing in common. “We were not the same generation, we were not the same kind of writer, we had led and were to continue to lead very different lives.”36 But it’s no coincidence that both women were provocateurs, both understood the importance of organizing a screenwriters’ union, and both were obsessed with the larger issues of capitalism and Communism and the specter of Fascism in Europe. Only in the thirties – in a place like Hollywood, an incubator of American communism – would such a serendipitous occurrence be possible, perhaps even inevitable. At another time, another place, such a friendship might not have happened. The real key to their relationship lies not in their style of living but in a likeminded obsession with politics.

  In the mid-1930s, Communism seemed a panacea to some screenwriters, not merely a cure-all but a powerful aphrodisiac as well. It was better than sex. It was true love. Among the most fervent believers were Dashiell Hammett, Donald Ogden Stewart, Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson – and Dottie and Lilly. In Lilly’s case, political awareness was a direct result of her affair with Hammett, a malcontent turned evangelical Marxist who joined the Communist Party in 1937. She was a member from 1938 to 1940, notwithstanding later claims to the contrary, and a Stalin supporter for the remainder of her life. There is no reliable evidence for Dottie becoming a member, although a close friend and former party member contends she was for a short time but dropped out in 1939 after the Hitler-Stalin
nonaggression pact. Whether her membership was formal or fiction seems irrelevant because she followed the party line as fiercely as any card-carrying member, and she would one day find herself blacklisted just like the rest. (The Communist Party did not interest Alan.)

  Involvement tended to be personal, and business was conducted privately. Meetings, which took place in people’s homes, drew serious political organizers, but others showed up out of curiosity; and for some, the party represented a social organization, handy places to pick up dates. Screenwriter Nathanael West, who found Communism a big snooze, and its believers closet romantics, agreed to attend a Marxist study group simply to please his wife.

  A decade earlier, the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti had split public opinion, as John Dos Passos sorrowfully concluded in his trilogy USA, “all right we are two nations.”37 In 1937, a civil war thousands of miles away – the battle for the Spanish republic against the Fascist forces of dictator Francisco Franco – rallied similar emotions. Some Americans who saw Spain as the first battle of a new world war signed up to fight with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, while others volunteered their services as doctors, nurses, and ambulance drivers.

  With emotions running so high, dissension was to be expected, and people took sides. Certainly the unorthodox views of home-brewed Bolsheviks were regarded as controversial, if anything extreme, to most Americans. When Lilly claimed that she would trade her writing career in order to make a better world, the soapbox tone understandably got a rise out of James Thurber. That was, he told E. B. White, the most egotistical claptrap he’d ever heard. Dottie, another early anti-Fascist, was not quite as outspoken as Lilly. Nevertheless, she too earned a reputation as a knee-jerk radical and found puzzled friends turning against her. “She was a very, very grande dame, and contrariness was the wellspring of her Communism,” Beatrice Stewart told one of Parker’s biographers. “She was anti. She was anti the Establishment.”38 Bea’s lack of sympathy was to be expected since her ex-husband Donald, an important screenwriter and a hotshot in the party, had left her to marry a Communist.