Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (15 page)

In addition to Dorothy, there were a number of women who joined the table: actresses Margalo Gillmore, Tallulah Bankhead, and Peggy Wood; writer-wives Ruth Hale and Jane Grant; and novelist Margaret Leech, who had a tongue second only to Dorothy’s for its sting. Lovely, blond Peggy Leech stared at Frank Adams when he arrived at lunch one day after a tennis match. His shirt was unbuttoned to reveal tufts of black curly hair.

“Well, Frank,” she said, “I see your fly is open higher than usual today.”

Before long, the Round Tablers hated to part after lunch. “Conversation was like oxygen to us,” Marc Connelly said. “We breathed each other in our remarks.” Unable to get through a weekend without seeing each other, some of the men began meeting on Saturday nights to play poker in a second floor suite at the hotel. The Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club convened on Saturday afternoons, played throughout the night, and sometimes the marathon continued into Monday morning. Regulars were F.P.A., Broun, Ross, Woollcott, and Kaufman, and joining them were others who practically never ate in the Rose Room
—World
editor Herbert Bayard Swope, silk merchant Paul Hyde Bonner, and Raoul Fleischmann of the baking-company fortune. Ring Lardner sometimes sat in. His minimalist conversation was practically limited to “Hello,” “I raise,” “I’m out,” and “Good night.” One night, Marc Connelly was losing so badly that he flew into a tantrum and ripped up his cards. Lardner only said, “Childish.” George Kaufman won most often and came up with the funniest retorts. When Raoul Fleischmann claimed he was fourteen before realizing he was a Jew, Kaufman said, “That’s nothing. I was sixteen before I knew I was a boy.” When a player bragged about tracing his ancestry back to the Crusades, Kaufman told him, “I had such an ancestor, too. Sir Roderick Kaufman. He also went on the Crusades—as a spy, of course.”

Eddie Parker, now back at Paine Webber on Wall Street, had freed himself from morphine but had returned to alcohol, a more respectable addiction. After leaving his office each day, he generally went to a speakeasy while Dorothy, feeling abandoned, waited and smoked cigarettes. Sometimes it was 9:00 P.M. before he showed up, by which time she would have spent several hours picturing him run over or dead. He would be safely but unpleasantly drunk, his alcoholic high having already come and gone, “leaving him loud and querulous and bristling for affronts,” as she described a fictional character based on him. Did she know what was wrong with her? he would ask. Immediately she would pull up a chair and give him her undivided attention, always being a dependable audience for any recital of her faults.

Since she blamed herself for the problems of the marriage, she was continually looking for ways to fix them. She decided there was nothing to be lost by a change of scenery, that is to say, by trying the ever-popular geography cure for ailing relationships. They moved south to midtown.

The Parkers rented a flat on the top floor of a shabby, three-story, red brick building at 57 West Fifty-seventh Street, on the corner of Sixth Avenue. It was a commercial property occupied by artists who needed studio space but generally lived elsewhere. Certainly there was little about the place to recommend it as a residence. The high girders of the Sixth Avenue elevated train cast a shadow over the building. Even on the brightest days, the El gave a gloomy aspect to the neighborhood, an unfashionable area of tenements and stores. Each time a train went crashing by, the noise was so deafening that all conversation had to halt. At first, this was disconcerting, but in time, as reality ate away bit by bit at their illusions, as the Parkers edged toward new crises, the racket assumed an appropriate symbolism, providing perfect sound effects for their marital battleground.

Excited by the promise of a Bohemian life, Dorothy was not in the least bit put off by the cramped, somewhat drab quarters. Neither she nor Eddie were domestic. In those days, none of the Round Tablers placed a high value on expensive appointments, and as Marc Connelly mentioned, their apartment had “a chair for everybody,” which was all that anyone expected. Dorothy was satisfied with their new home. Sculptor Sally James Farnham, who owned a pet monkey, had a studio on their floor. Downstairs was the Swiss Alps restaurant, and down the block a drug store that sold decent gin made from pure alcohol.

Along with the flat, they acquired a Boston terrier that they christened Woodrow Wilson for patriotic reasons and a canary that Dorothy called Onan because he spilled his seed on the ground. The Parkers, who had difficulty caring for themselves, did not really need the responsibility of pets, but to Dorothy, no real family could possibly be complete without animals. It was a sign of her determination to cure the marriage that she chose a dog like her beloved Rags. Unfortunately, the Parker household bore little resemblance to the elaborate establishment maintained by Henry Rothschild, nor were there servants to look after the dog. No doubt Dorothy realized that pets need air and exercise and that Woodrow Wilson deserved to be trained and housebroken, but she was unable to manage it. She forgot to take him out, and Eddie, involved in affairs of his own, also seemed incapable of establishing a routine for the dog’s care. In the end, Woodrow Wilson had to make the best of it. When Charles Baskerville visited the apartment to show Dorothy some drawings, he noticed that the floorboards had begun to warp.

In September, she and Eddie planned a New England vacation. On their way north, they stopped at Hartford to visit his family. By this time, Dorothy had fallen into the habit of disparaging her in-laws, as well as the whole city of Hartford, which had to be inhabited by bigots simply because the Parkers lived there.

At Birches, Maine, there was little to do but fish. Every day, even when the water was rough, they went out on the lake to catch trout, salmon, and chub. Dorothy took a conservationist’s approach to fishing. She threw back practically everything they managed to pull in and insisted that Eddie do likewise. She could not bear watching the fish expire. She told him that they had got on the line by mistake and must be put back in case their children needed them. Although exercise held no appeal, the beauty of the island inspired her to take a few hikes. She was delighted to catch a glimpse of a porcupine. Since the water proved too cold for swimming, she never got a chance to wear her new bathing suit and joked about bequeathing it to a hard-up Ziegfeld ingenue. In their room at night a fire was lit, which sounds cozy and romantic, but there was no hint of any sexuality in her relations with Eddie. Writing to Benchley, she did not trouble to camouflage her dissatisfaction.

Some children here have the whooping cough,
If we don’t get it, we’ll be in soft.
The desk clerk’s manner is proud and airy,
Nevertheless, we think he’s a fairy.
There are some people right next door
Who turned out to be a terrible bore.
There always must be some kind of a hitch
Isn’t Nature (finish this line for yourself
and get a year’s subscription to the Boston
Post.)

The main hitch, of course, was Eddie, but she had no need to explain that to Benchley. She did mention that “we’d like a dash of hootch. In fact, we’d like it very much,” but since she seldom drank it is unlikely that she was referring to herself. It seems more likely that Eddie was making an effort to go on the wagon in healthful surroundings, in which case the vacation would have been a strain for both of them. She openly admitted her homesickness for Benchley and barraged him with postcards that she signed “Flo [Ziegfeld] and Billie [Burke]” and “Condé [Nast] and Clarisse [Nast’s estranged wife].” Repeatedly, she reminded him how much she missed him and wished he were there “and that’s the god’s truth.”

Beginning in 1920, when the Round Table was forming, Dorothy became friendly with illustrator Neysa McMein, who had a studio across the hall from Dorothy. Neysa was five years older than Dorothy, an emancipated, frankly ambitious woman from Quincy, Illinois, who had been increasingly in demand to draw covers in pastel for top magazines and commercial advertisers. She looked like a Brunhild—tall, blond, athletic, with a classically beautiful face, masses of touseled, tawny hair, and a grin that dissolved into easy laughter. Neysa was not particularly witty and seldom came up with the mots that flew whenever the Round Tablers assembled, but she took pride in acting as their appreciative audience. Considering the assorted emotional disorders in the group, she was probably the least neurotic person among them, a straightforward woman with a talent for aggressive self-promotion. In her skylighted studio the Round Table established its second home by dropping in each afternoon between four and seven, until it had become an annex to the Algonquin. Sometimes Dorothy skipped lunch at the Rose Room because it was expensive, but Neysa’s open house became a regular stop on her daily circuit.

The studio’s big main room was painted a pale, dirty beige, sparsely furnished, and cluttered with a comfortable jumble of coats, overshoes, and sporting equipment. Neysa never permitted guests to interrupt her work and generally ignored people after greeting them. Even when the place grew crowded and so noisy that conversation was almost impossible, the centerpiece was always Neysa seated at her easel on a raised platform, hair uncombed, faced smudged with pastels, her smock held together with safety pins. In addition to the Round Table, her guests included people from the theater and Tin Pan Alley, the same show-business celebrities whose names appeared in F.P.A.’s column. On a typical day, Dorothy might find Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson, Ethel Barrymore, Jascha Heifetz, and playing duets on Neysa’s piano, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin.

Not every visitor to Neysa’s place succumbed to its appeal, and some hated it. Anita Loos, newly arrived in New York, thought that Neysa was “phony” and dismissed her celebrated guests as being without much interest “except for Dorothy Parker and Herbert Bayard Swope.” She sized up Dorothy as a “lone wolverine,” a woman who had “no belief in friendship” and associated with the Round Table only because she had nothing better to do. As for Woollcott and the rest, Loos never altered her opinion of them as willfully sophisticated suburbanites unable to admit their mediocrity. In
But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes
, her heroine, Lorelei Lee, remarks that the geniuses who eat at the Algonquin “are so busy thinking up some cute remark to make, that they never have time to do any listening.”

At Neysa’s studio the liquor flowed freely. She became proficient at manufacturing gin. In her tiny bathroom she installed a still, a complicated piece of apparatus which required frequent repair by Connelly and Benchley but which nevertheless was much envied by friends who wanted one for their own apartments. Dorothy, intrigued by the still, liked to escort unknowing strangers to the bathroom, where she conducted a personalized tour of the machinery.

One afternoon she encountered Gertrude Benchley at Neysa’s. Most of the time Gertrude remained secluded in Scarsdale with the children, but occasionally she hired a babysitter and came into town to attend the theater with her husband.

It had become almost second nature for Dorothy to make wisecracks at Gertrude’s expense. She characterized her as the sort of woman who might eat her young; anyone who found Gertrude attractive must have a vast acquaintance among the astigmatic—she always looked as if she were rushing from a burning building. Though Gertrude was not fond of Dorothy either, whenever they chanced to meet, they both behaved cordially for the sake of appearances and Robert Benchley. At Neysa’s, Dorothy began making suitably sympathetic inquiries about the Benchley children, so many that Gertrude slowly lowered her guard. When Dorothy later volunteered to pilot her to the bathroom to view the famous still, Gertrude willingly followed. In the bathroom, Dorothy began to freshen her makeup, then noticed Gertrude’s face and presented her with a compact.

“Have some powder on your nose,” she suggested.

“I never use make-up,” Gertrude said, stating the obvious.

When Dorothy insisted, Gertrude gave in and began applying the powder, only to notice a strange transformation taking place. She looked more closely at her reflection in the mirror. Her nose seemed to be turning bright red. Dorothy had given her a cake of rouge.

“That’s not funny!” she shrieked.

Dorothy’s reputation as a funny woman was born at the Algonquin but it developed at Neysa’s. In the opening years of the twenties, when New York humor was quickening its pace, nobody had faster reactions than she did. She had learned all there was to know about speedy repartee in her father’s house, where it had been a staple at every gathering of the Rothschild aunts and uncles, although nothing would have induced her to advertise that bit of personal history. To her Round Table friends like Marc Connelly (who had the impression her father had been a Talmudic scholar, an impression Dorothy never bothered to correct), her tongue seemed born quick and deadly, like a knife already implanted before anyone could catch a glimpse of the blade. There was nothing cheerful or kindly about her barbs; they were meant to be sharp, nasty, and vengeful. She took pleasure in galloping to the punch line before her victims got there. She could be witty on paper, but her forte was oral agility. She was truly at her best in conversation, where she presented the routine she had perfected: demure, deadpan expression, the disparity between a patrician voice modulated to just above a whisper and her inexhaustible repertoire of obscenities.

Wicked put-downs seemed to flow effortlessly. Hearing that a friend had hurt her leg while visiting London, she voiced a naughty suspicion: Probably the woman had injured herself while sliding down a barrister.

Wasn’t the Yale prom wonderful? she said. If all the girls in attendance were laid end to end, she wouldn’t be at all surprised.

At a Halloween party, she hoped they would play ducking for apples. There, but for a typographical error, was the story of her life.

Bidding good night to a friend, she promised to telephone soon, then immediately cracked that the woman spoke eighteen languages but couldn’t manage to say no in any of them.