Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (11 page)

If the flora and fauna of Benchley’s homeland had been alcoholism and rejection, he grew up seemingly untouched by misfortunes of any kind. During his adolescence, a wealthy woman who claimed to have been his brother’s secret fiancée offered to pay for his education at Phillips Exeter Academy, followed by four years at Harvard. In college, where he became one of the best-liked students on campus, Benchley was editor of the
Harvard Lampoon
and a star of the Hasty Pudding shows. Two years after he graduated, in the class of 1912, he married Gertrude Darling, a Worcester girl whom he had known since elementary school. By the time he arrived at
Vanity Fair
, he seemed to be a well-adjusted family man with his personality and his life set as if in concrete. Though the couple had a small son and Gertrude was pregnant again, Benchley had yet to earn enough to support his family. He still entered the purchase of each newspaper and every postage stamp in his pocket expense book.

It was a mystery to Dorothy why Crowninshield had selected Benchley to be managing editor and how—or even if—he had written all the loony pieces that had been appearing regularly in the magazine. On the basis of his writing, she had imagined him to have a delicious sense of the absurd, some rare and extravagant madness that she described as “a leaping of the mind,” and that others would describe as “almost-logic, the same chilly, fascinating little skid off the hard road and right up to the edge of the swamp.” Yet on first meeting her new colleague, Benchley’s lunacy was not obvious to Dorothy.

Several days passed. Just as she was growing accustomed to sharing her office with the methodical Mr. Benchley, Crowninshield brought in another new employee and assigned him a third desk in the room. Never before had Dorothy laid eyes on anyone quite like this individual. He was a giant—six foot seven inches, stooped, rail-thin, with cavernous brown eyes and a nailbrush mustache. Robert Sherwood, a twenty-three-year-old veteran who had served in the Canadian Black Watch and had been gassed and wounded, was plainly ill because he filled the office with his gasps as he struggled for breath. Communication was difficult because he refused to speak. When a stenographer came in to take dictation from him, he sat on the floor and turned his back on the woman.

Nobody knew what Sherwood was supposed to do. Applying for the job, he had appeared in his Black Watch uniform, and Crownie, no doubt impressed by the kilt, had hired him for a three-month trial period at a salary that was only five dollars more than the secretaries were earning. He gave him the vague title of drama editor, but told Benchley that he was to be picture editor. Eventually Sherwood decided that his real job was to be “a sort of maid of all work.”

He made Dorothy and Benchley so uncomfortable that before long they began lunching together just to discuss the problem. She put forth the theory that Sherwood was a “Conversation Stopper” and that, in her experience, trying to talk to a “Stopper” was like “riding on the Long Island railroad—it gets you nowhere in particular.” She also thought he looked tough and sinister. Benchley wondered how Crowninshield could have saddled him with a freak whose military exploits even remained a mystery. With so much of Sherwood to shoot at, how could the Germans have managed to hit him in both legs? He suspected that Sherwood must have been lying on his back, waving his feet in the air. The truth about Robert Sherwood did not occur to either of them. He was merely struck dumb in their presence.

Several days later, as Dorothy and Benchley were leaving for lunch, they were surprised to find Sherwood waiting for them outside the building. Hesitant, he asked whether they would mind if he walked down West Forty-fourth Street with them—not
with
them actually but
between
them—for he was in need of protection. “In those days,” Dorothy recalled, “the Hippodrome, a block from the office, had engaged a troupe of midgets and Mr. Sherwood ... wouldn’t go down the street unless Mr. Benchley walked on one side of him and I on the other, because, with his six feet 7 inches, he was afraid the midgets might tease him if he were alone.” Looking like an ambulatory pipe organ, the editors set off down the street, but the midgets ran squeaking alongside yelling “Hey, Legs!,” warning him to duck when he crossed under the Sixth Avenue El, and demanded to know how the weather was up there. At Sixth Avenue, having outrun “the nasty little things,” Dorothy and Benchley felt obliged to invite Sherwood to join them for lunch, and the ice was finally broken.

Back at the office, Dorothy whispered to Benchley that she was having second thoughts. Sherwood was “nice.” Benchley agreed that he was “one of the nicest guys I ever saw.” After that things began to change.

Upon closer acquaintance, Dorothy discovered that Sherry was “pretty fast.” He wore his straw hat at a rakish angle, tried to make dates with the receptionist, and admitted to lifting a few in Broadway cabarets. One day when he acknowledged having a hangover, Benchley expressed alarm and disapproval. Dorothy sprang to Sherwood’s defense, declaring that she had once attended a cocktail party.

Benchley was doubly shocked. “Mark my words,” he warned her, “alcohol will coarsen you.”

Dorothy could see nothing wrong with drinking an occasional cocktail.

Colored photographs of corpses appeared on the walls at
Vanity Fair
. While the atmosphere at the magazine had always been lively, now it was becoming downright rowdy. At first Crowninshield was pleased to note that his three editors had taken “an enormous shine to one another.” What he failed to understand was how much clowning was actually taking place. After Benchley told Dorothy about his enjoyment of two undertaking magazines,
The Casket
and
Sunnyside,
she decided to become a subscriber. Whenever a new issue arrived in the mail, the two of them stopped working to admire the pictures of cadavers, then they read aloud the humor column, “From Grave to Gay,” and howled with laughter.

Dorothy found the magazines hilarious. “I cut out a picture out of one of them, in color, of how and where to inject the embalming fluid, and had it hung over my desk.” But in Crowninshield’s memory, there was not one but an entire row of brightly colored anatomical plates above her desk, and he asked her to remove them. “I dared suggest that they might prove a little startling to our occasional visitors, and that, perhaps, something by Marie Laurencin might do as well.” Dorothy responded to his suggestion with “the most palpable contempt.”

Already Crownie’s la-dee-dah mannerisms were beginning to grate on Benchley’s New England nerves, but Dorothy said that she felt sorry for Crownie. He was “a lovely man, but puzzled,” and she had to admit that “we behaved extremely badly.”

After several weeks of this, Crowninshield privately began to think of the magazine as a lions’ den with himself in the uncomfortable position of tamer. No doubt his editors were still cubs, “amazing whelps” he called them, whose teeth were not yet sharp and whose claws had not grown long, but they seemed to be animals nonetheless. Later on he described their antics more benignly: “Indeed I believe that in no period of their lives did the three find more enjoyment, make more friends, or work as hard, or as easily.” In the early summer of 1919, the problem was that the cubs weren’t working particularly hard and sometimes they weren’t working at all. They were expected in the office at eight-thirty but often showed up late, then spent the mornings in enthusiastic personal conversations, took long lunch hours at Child’s, and went home early. Whenever it was necessary for Sherwood to leave the office, even though the midgets had left town, he would say, “Walk down the street with me,” and all three would nip out for some air. Dorothy remembered that “Mr. Benchley and I would leave our jobs and guide him down the street. I can’t tell you, we had more fun.”

Condé Nast was far from entertained. He instructed the business manager to enforce the company’s tardy rule with a memo warning that latecomers would be required to fill out a slip explaining why they were late. Benchley was the first to receive one. His reply, hundreds of words in tiny handwriting covering a slip of paper the size of a playing card, unfolded a sorrowful tale of how he had arrived early, heard that the Hippodrome’s elephants had got loose, offered to round them up, chased them up to Seventy-second Street and down West End Avenue to the Hudson River docks where they were trying to board the boats of the Fall River Line, and finally herded them back to the Hippodrome, thereby averting a major marine disaster but unfortunately causing him to be eleven minutes late for work.

This was his first and last tardy slip, but the battle lines had been silently drawn up, with the whelps on one side, Condé Nast on the other, and a nervous Crowninshield in the middle.

At the end of June, Nast and Crowninshield departed for a two-month trip abroad and left Benchley in charge of publishing two issues of the magazine with the assistance of Dorothy and Sherwood. What made Nast imagine this would be a sensible plan is hard to fathom. On the day of sailing the editors appeared at the
Aquitania
with a floral horseshoe, the tackiest one they had been able to buy, and offered exuberant bon voyage wishes to their bosses. Liberated, they trooped back to the office and immediately began to go haywire. Naturally they kept hours that suited them. They also took steps to upgrade Sherwood’s position and salary. Unable to authorize a raise, Benchley did the next best thing and assigned him several articles to write. The first piece he turned in was a piece of juvenalia better suited to a college humor magazine than the country’s most sophisticated monthly, but Benchley purchased it for seventy-five dollars, a higher price than some well-known contributors were getting. When the editor of the men’s fashion department went on vacation leaving a half-finished column, Sherwood completed it with predictions that best-dressed men would soon be wearing waistcoats trimmed with cut jade and peg-topped trousers. This cracked Benchley up, and he and Dorothy sent it off to the printer. Nobody, they assured each other, ever read the stupid column anyway.

In June, Dorothy received an invitation to attend a luncheon at the Algonquin Hotel, a party hosted by two theatrical press agents to welcome Alexander Woollcott,
The New York Times
’s drama critic, back from the war.

Woollcott was a fat, bespectacled man of thirty-two whose smallish features tended to sink like raisins into a pudding of jowls and double chins. A master of the insult, he already had acquired a considerable reputation for bitchiness. It was said that entering into conversation with him was like petting an overfed Persian cat who had just sharpened its claws. Those who found his personality uncomfortable dismissed him as a one-man freak show, but to his intimate friends—and in time they would be a cult numbering in the hundreds and ranging from Eleanor Roosevelt to the Marx brothers—he was an acquired taste. They would vie with each other to find the right words to describe his personality: “Old Vitriol and Violets,” James Thurber dubbed him; Louisa M. Woollcott, said Howard Dietz; a New Jersey Nero in a pinafore, according to Edna Ferber. George Jean Nathan called him “the Seidlitz powder of Times Square” but the only epithet to capture the whole man was George Kaufman’s one-word label, “Improbable.”

A native of Red Bank, New Jersey, he was the maternal grandson of a founder of the Phalanx, a Fourieristic commune that was a lesser known but more successful counterpart of Brook Farm: Owing to his father’s frequent absences, Woollcott grew up in genteel poverty among his mother’s people at the Phalanx. After graduating in 1909 from Hamilton College, he worked briefly as a teller with the Chemical National Bank of New York while trying to obtain a reporter’s job on
The New York Times
. His literary style leaned heavily on the side of lavender and old lace, but he successfully resisted all impulses to improve it. If not one of the worst writers in America, he surely ranked among the top ten. Even his friends made fun of his style and were genuinely surprised to realize just how atrocious it actually was. (Even more surprising was the amount of money he earned by it.) In 1912, the
Times
appointed him drama critic, a position in which his taste for overripe adjectives seemed acceptable.