Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (19 page)

Writing fiction was a torturous process for her. When she insisted that it took her six months to complete a story, it was often the case. Instead of making a first draft, she thought out each paragraph beforehand and then laboriously wrote it down in longhand sentence by sentence. She may have been careless about many aspects of living, but she was obsessively careful, a perfectionist, in her writing. Nothing pleased her and she couldn’t “write five words but that I change seven.” She named her characters from the obituary columns or the telephone book. The notion of jotting down ideas and phrases in a writer’s journal appealed to her and she managed to start one “but I could never remember where I put the damn thing.” Finally she typed out the story on her typewriter, a tool that frustrated and mystified her, as did all machines. Once, stymied in a struggle to change a ribbon, she abandoned the machine in disgust and quietly resolved the problem by buying a new one.

“Such a Pretty Little Picture” marked the beginning of her literary career, but pride in her achievement was overshadowed by the departure of Eddie, by the emptiness of the flat, and the vague but unmistakable whiff of failure. Since her obsession had arisen and walked away, there was only herself to look after, a person she had never believed worth much trouble. From another perspective, her situation had dramatically improved overnight because now she was released from a variety of humiliations. There was an opportunity to heal herself, if she desired. She did not.

Accustomed to chaos, she hardly knew what to do with herself without Eddie and felt compelled to replace him immediately. Marc Connelly said that “when they were living together I don’t think she had any lovers. But after Eddie left, then the men were in and out of her house like mail.” But not at once. First, Dorothy fell in love.

When she met Charles Gordon MacArthur, he was a twenty-seven-year-old newspaperman with curly brown hair, an elfin grin, and charm that left few people of either sex unaffected. Everyone who knew him, said Aleck Woollcott, “always lights up and starts talking about him as if he was a marvelous circus that had once passed his way.” MacArthur’s beginnings were rooted in poverty and violent religiosity. He was the son of a mother who died early of exhaustion and an Elmer Gantry—like evangelist father who could smell a sinner ten miles away on a windless day. Chasing the ungodly from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Chicago, to Nyack, New York, where he finally settled down, William Telfer MacArthur believed he owned a direct line to the Almighty. Having convinced himself that his six children must be in the sulfurous grasp of Lucifer, he would line them up, MacArthur recalled, “beseech God in a firm voice to forgive us, uncover our backs and whale the hell out of us. He kept a strap soaked in vinegar to make it a finer instrument of the Lord.” At fourteen, he was sent to Wilson Academy in Nyack, a seminary with a curriculum that leaned heavily on prayer and Bible study and with an aim to train boys for the ministry and missionary work. After his mother died in 1913, he ran away to New York City and found employment as a salesman in the necktie department of Lord & Taylor.

From there he moved to Chicago and got jobs on newspapers. During the Pershing expedition to Mexico, MacArthur joined the First Illinois Cavalry, and in the World War he served in France with the Rainbow Division. Afterward he returned to Chicago, where he became a reporter on the
Herald-Examiner
. By the early 1920s, he and his friend Ben Hecht had become the highest-paid newsmen in the city.

In 1922, he went to work for the
New York American
, but by this time his ambition was to become a playwright. He met Aleck Woollcott in New York. As drama critic for the
World
, Woollcott, who had appointed himself keeper of the gateway to theatrical and literary fame, immediately began to regard MacArthur as a fabulous personal discovery. Adoring his wild sense of humor, admiring him extravagantly (as he would his next enthusiasm, Harpo Marx), Woollcott affectionately christened MacArthur “Baby Vomit” and brought him around to the Algonquin to meet his friends.

Since playing matchmaker was one of Woollcott’s favorite avocations, he naturally thought of bringing together Charlie and the woman who was, in his words, “a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth,” and whose lacy sleeve had “a bottle of vitriol concealed in its folds.” Knowing that “our Mrs. Parker,” as he possessively called her, was alone and could use cheering up, he benevolently presented Charlie to her in the manner of a retriever laying a catch at his owner’s feet. Since Woollcott knew that MacArthur had a wife, his gift was not entirely an act of generosity.

MacArthur, in common with Dorothy, had married his first love only to see it turn out badly, which was one reason he was living in New York but his wife was not. Two years earlier, at the
Herald-Examiner’
s water cooler, he had met Carol Frink whose duties as the paper’s so-called Girl Reporter included covering beekeepers’ conventions or dressing up as a Western Union messenger and delivering telegrams. Frink, a petite blonde with a tiny waistline and hair cut in an Ivanhoe pageboy, was loaded with so much pep that she once turned cartwheels down Michigan Avenue, which struck MacArthur as delightful. A few months later they were married by his father and spent their honeymoon at Coney Island. Frink’s ambition to quit her job and write a novel was encouraged by her husband, who appreciated bright, literary women. In due course he bought her a typewriter, a raccoon coat, and agreed to finance a retreat in the Michigan woods, which she believed a necessary condition for serious writing without interruption.

By 1922, their relationship must have been fraying badly because Frink was not with MacArthur when he moved to New York. While they were separated geographically, the estrangement was far from final. Charlie continued to write her regularly, signing his letters “Charliecums” and similar baby-talking diminutives. Still, he was an unhappy man. Aside from knowing by now that Carol had little talent for writing fiction, he also suffered from loneliness and felt considerable antagonism toward his new home. New York, unlike Chicago, which he considered a reporter’s paradise, struck him as a phony, smart-aleck town more suitable for press agents than for newspapermen. Newspaper reporters customarily were hearty drinkers, but MacArthur drank more than most. Soon he was putting away a quart of Scotch every night. He was not a good-natured drunk. Hanging around subway entrances, he would yell, “God damn New Yorker! Deny you’re a lousy New Yorker!” More than one lousy New Yorker punched him in the mouth. Once, on a spree with his writer friend Gene Fowler, he began to feel sorry for the lonely dogs at the ASPCA pound and decided something should be done for them. Buying birthday cakes at a fancy French bakery, he delivered the sweets in a taxi. “My good man,” he announced to the ASPCA porter, “we’ve come to jubilate with your charges.”

The attraction between Dorothy and Charles MacArthur was immediate and intense, a case of, Marc Connelly thought, “a two-ton truck meetin’ another two-ton truck. That was a collision on the highway there.” She made no secret of the fact that she found him the answer to her prayers or that she was captivated by his sense of humor and a playful recklessness reminiscent of Eddie Parker when she first had made his acquaintance. Soon they were seen constantly in each other’s company, at theater openings, at a party Irene Castle gave for her husband, at Tony Soma’s and numerous other speakeasies (and they were once caught by federal agents in a raid). In the late afternoons they usually could be found at Neysa’s studio, where Anita Loos caught a glimpse of Dorothy looking like a woman very much in love. It seemed clear to her that Dorothy’s “crush” was ill-advised, because MacArthur struck her as a playboy “not to be pinned down by any one girl.”

Dorothy, meanwhile, was busily composing love poetry for Charlie who was, she wrote, her “one love,” a man for whom she wore her heart “like a wet, red stain” on her sleeve for all to see. The Round Tablers, who first had received the news of the affair with amusement, were now amazed at Dorothy’s innocence. Not only was she serious about Charlie but she seemed to expect that he would reciprocate the intensity of her feelings.

MacArthur found her irresistible. She was the type of woman to whom he had always been drawn, even though he probably realized that this type was not necessarily what he needed. To him she was a pretty, successful writer with a Rabelaisian wit and a manner that seemed to be frankly sexual. There is no reason to believe that he regarded her as much more than a casual flirtation. He had disliked being married and now, technically single again, he was enjoying himself. In New York a few months, he had already established a reputation as a woman-chaser who bounced from bed to bed. Neysa McMein presented him with a rubber stamp that printed I LOVE YOU, a convenience in his many conquests, and Marc Connelly summed him up as “just a bird looking for the right twig to land on.” Dorothy chose to ignore the fact that he never remained on any twig for long.

She was distraught when she saw him with other women and could not help bursting into tears, expecting that the sight of her pain might convince him of how deeply she loved him. “Lips that taste of tears,” she wrote, “are the best for kissing.” Charlie did not agree. He was losing interest in her.

To Dorothy’s consternation, she realized that she was pregnant. She had once dreamed of bearing Eddie’s child and only common sense had mercifully outrun her desire for maternity. She felt reluctant to let go of either her lover or her baby. Procrastinating, she worked on a Post piece about novelists who, like Scott Fitzgerald, make fortunes writing about the rebellious younger generation. She lived from day to day in bewildered agony, alternately denying and accepting the certainties of her situation. “It’s not the tragedies that kill us,” she believed. “It’s the messes. I can’t stand messes.” Her untimely pregnancy, a tragedy, also qualified as a sorry mess. She found herself, at the age of twenty-nine, married, pregnant, and carrying the child of another man, also married. Reluctance to abort the fetus only partially accounted for her paralysis. She seems to have been waiting, hoping that Charlie would return to her, hoping like a small child herself that painful choices would magically dissolve and allow them to dramatically shed their legal spouses before riding away into the sunset with their love child.

In the fall she was busy rehearsing for another Round Table theatrical production. Encouraged by the success of
No Sirree
, the group was mounting a full-scale revue at the Punch and Judy Theatre where they hoped for an extended run. Dorothy and Benchley collaborated on a one-act drama, Nero, whose plot had little to do with Roman emperors but whose characters included Cardinal Richelieu playing solitaire, Generals Lee and Grant, Queen Victoria, and the New York Giants winning a pennant.
The Forty-niners
had other sketches concocted by Ring Lardner, Heywood Broun, and Howard Dietz and was staged by George Kaufman and Marc Connelly. Despite the considerable talent involved, it was a grab bag of hit-and-miss sketches, mostly miss.
The Forty-niners
opened on a rainy evening in early November and ran fifteen performances before closing. Frank Crowninshield said that maybe he missed the point “but was it all supposed to be taking place in an insane asylum?” Even Woollcott was embarrassed and admitted that the show “wasn’t fun. Not at all.”

Dorothy, in the meantime, could delay no longer. After the revue folded, her doctor performed a legal hospital abortion. There was no problem about obtaining one, so long as she had the means to pay. Her guilt and anguish were exacerbated by the doctor, who was upset to discover in the operating room that she was further along than she had known or had admitted to him. Either from the physician’s remarks or perhaps from glimpsing the fetal material, she became convinced that the embryo’s hands were already formed, confirming her suspicion that she had done something truly wicked.

For a while afterward, she numbly resisted the temptation to speak about the experience, but, in time, the truth became known to her friends. It was a subject she brought up periodically, usually late at night at Tony’s, when she had drunk a great deal and verged on brimming over with great emotional cloudbursts. Then, with little discrimination, she would unburden herself to her drinking companions, mostly males who classified abortion stories as woman talk and wished she would go home and sleep it off. Despite herself, she went on talking, haunted by the memory of the operation.

Cruel stories began to make the rounds of the speakeasies. She was quoted as saying that the experience served her right for having put all her eggs in one bastard. Another piece of gossip reported that MacArthur had contributed thirty dollars toward the cost of the abortion, which had prompted Dorothy to declare that it was like Judas making a refund.

On Christmas Day eight plays opened. It made her angry to imagine that others were at home checking on the fires caused by their Christmas tree candles or strolling to the ice box for a nibble of cold turkey, but she had no tree or turkey, no comfortable fireside where she might warm herself. Her apartment, despite the presence of Woodrow Wilson and Onan, seemed the saddest, loneliest place on the face of the earth, and to top it off she had to “wrap her shabby garments about her and rush out into the bitter night, to see as many as possible of the new plays.”

Most of the time she was tired and depressed. Her tears could be stirred by almost anything—a stray cat, the horses on Sixth Avenue, their heads drooping. She began sleeping all day until it was time to dress and go out for the evening. Scotch, she found, only made her sleepy, and when she woke up, she felt worse than ever. Reveries, visions of serenity, slithered into her head and stuck there. She could not pinpoint any one moment when she first decided to kill herself. Instead it seemed as if the idea had been a possibility as long as she could remember, like an ache that could be ignored most of the time but then began to throb unexpectedly. In truth, she had no great passion for violence. What she objected to was existence, its futility, its complicated surges of sadness that always left her feeling more surprised than angry. Taking herself through a single day presented no burden, but having to repeat the effort day after day was tiresome.