Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (24 page)

Dorothy and Benchley tried to strengthen each other by proclaiming how little they cared for public opinion, but it was wishful thinking and, in the long run, not helpful to either of them. It is not surprising that Gertrude’s initial dislike of Dorothy was hardening. Mrs. Benchley was determined to make no overtly hostile statement, but could not resist an occasional acid aside. In retrospect, she told an interviewer, Dorothy “wasn’t a very nice person—well, no. I won’t say that. Whenever she came up here, she never helped with the dishes—fled upstairs.” A cardinal sin in Gertrude’s book was coming to dinner and not offering to help with the washing up. (It never occurred to Dorothy to wash up her own dishes.) Nor did Gertrude truly understand why Dorothy had separated from Eddie Parker. She professed to be puzzled that “she was fond of him” and yet there were “so many [men] after that.”

About this time Dorothy was confronted by a curious situation when her best friend and her ex-lover decided to live together. One night Benchley encountered Charles MacArthur near the punch bowl at a cocktail party and impulsively said that if MacArthur ever needed a place to stay he could share his apartment.

“I’m a late sleeper,” warned MacArthur.

“Delighted to hear it,” Benchley replied.

Once MacArthur moved into the fourth-floor walk-up on Madison Avenue, where the two men lived for the next three years, Dorothy could not escape his presence without giving up the company of Benchley. As a result, the three of them were often together.

While finishing up the play, Dorothy had put aside other assignments, which now were due or overdue. Always reluctant to refuse offers of money, she had responded favorably to one from publisher George Palmer Putnam, who had cooked up an unusual idea for a serialized mystery novel. Nineteen well-known writers had been invited each to contribute a chapter. Dorothy had unthinkingly accepted, perhaps hoping that when the time came, she would be able to dash off her chapter effortlessly. No writing, even froth, came easily to her. Carolyn Wells had written the first chapter of
Bobbed Hair
, Woollcott the second, and now the collaborative murder story had a plot whose complications almost defied description and, alas, had magically progressed to chapter seven. It was Dorothy’s turn.

Her standard, well-practiced evasions did not work with Putnam, who was publishing the serial monthly in
Collier’s
before it appeared as a book and breathing impatiently down her neck. She was further distracted by Benchley’s surgery for his arthritic problems and his subsequent departure for Nantucket to recuperate. After he had gone, the traffic in and out of her Algonquin suite seemed to grow unusually heavy. A number of people had the habit of dropping in and ordering a club sandwich from room service. There was a continual parade of waiters coming and going with pots of coffee. None of this commotion contributed to her concentration. After taking her out to dinner and a show one night, MacArthur reported to Woollcott that she had finally finished the chapter but only after Putnam had threatened to call out the police and fire departments.

A snapshot taken that summer found its way into Aleck Woollcott’s photo album: Dorothy posing with Aleck, Art Samuels, Harpo Marx, and Charlie, who is seated cozily at Dorothy’s side, their shoulders touching, the faintest of smiles on their mouths, smiles of complicity. Her continuing intimacy with MacArthur, who had become romantically involved with comedienne Beatrice Lillie, is interesting in view of other writing she was now doing. As friendly as she had become with him, she had not forgotten or forgiven his rejection of her or the pain he had caused her. The result was a bitter story, her third, this one dealing with the subject of abortion. In “Mr. Durant,” she ventured to characterize MacArthur as a middle-aged monster of a husband and father who tyrannizes his family as well as his mistress and who gets rid of his children’s dog while they sleep. The need to write this story must have been intense because she faced the problem of disguising the identities of Charlie and herself. In the story she exaggerated herself as a naïve, pathetic twenty-year-old stenographer in a rubber plant, a classic victim. Despite her off-beat theme and an extremely hostile portrayal of unfaithful husbands who impregnate their mistresses, she sold the story to Henry Mencken for his new magazine,
The American Mercury
, and it was published in the September issue. While she had painted MacArthur as a brutally insensitive man, this did not seem to interfere with their cordial relations. Possibly he chose not to recognize himself in “Mr. Durant.”

The Democratic National Convention convened at Madison Square Garden in June. Suddenly the city was crowded with visitors and cars, new revues were opening to cash in on the convention trade, Fifth Avenue was festooned with flags, and women were wearing the new summer styles: nude-colored stockings, floppy hats, and blue-and-pink chintz dresses that looked like flowered wallpapers. At the
World
, Herbert Swope had installed a radio in his office, and the Round Tablers listened to the convention proceedings on the wireless, or sometimes they dropped by the Garden to hear the speeches. The Democrats finally nominated John W. Davis of West Virginia, but these historical events held little interest for Dorothy, who stuck close to her rooms on the second floor of the Algonquin, regulated her drinking, and got out quantities of work. Like every writer she knew, she wrote when she was not drinking—and she drank when she was not busy working. “We drank our heads off, but we worked like holy hell.” Despite a spell of sultry, sticky weather, so unseasonable for June, she felt better than she had in a long while. After finishing “Mr. Durant,” she began collaborating with George Kaufman on a one-act play, the first and only occasion they ever worked together.

Famous Players—Lasky had purchased the film rights to the Kaufman-Connelly stage hit
Beggar on Horseback
. As part of the deal, they asked Kaufman to supply a curtain-raiser, a live playlet to be performed on the same bill as the film. Why Kaufman chose Dorothy instead of Connelly as his collaborator is puzzling, because they were not fond of each other. He felt put off by her obscenities, which he considered unladylike and offensive. She thought he was “a mess” and could see “nothing in that talent at all,” although she grudgingly admitted that he could be funny now and then. Somehow they managed to contain their disdain long enough to produce
Business Is Business
, a forty-minute, four-scene farce that satirized a shoe manufacturer’s obsession with making money. Kaufman at this time happened to be preoccupied with lampooning big business, and Dorothy’s contempt for commercialism was solidly underpinned by her experiences with J. Henry Rothschild and Eddie Parker.
The New York Times
thought it was a clever play with “scintillating ideas” and “some amusing lines,” but it is impossible to know for certain because neither author liked it enough to keep a copy.

Many of her friends were away. She saw little of Don Stewart, who had written a comic novel,
The Crazy Fool
, the leading characters of which were based more or less on herself and Benchley. Neysa, married and pregnant, had taken a summer place in Mamaroneck. Aleck Woollcott, writing a biography of Irving Berlin and claiming he needed solitude to work, spent a month on Neshobe Island in Vermont. When she next saw him, he was talking about buying the wooded island as a communal summer retreat for the Round Tablers. She kept running into Harold Ross and Jane Grant who turned up at party after party, passing a hat for a weekly magazine they wanted to publish. Everywhere they went they carried a dummy of the magazine until people were bored seeing and hearing about it. They were looking for investors and hoping to raise fifty thousand dollars from friends, but nobody was biting. None of the Round Tablers believed Ross capable of starting a magazine about New York. Woollcott thought the idea sounded “crazy” and flatly refused to listen. Dorothy listened but had no cash to invest. At a party given by Ruth and Raoul Fleischmann, Jane delivered an enthusiastic pitch that succeeded in whetting Raoul’s interest. By nature a gambler who owned several racehorses and did minor speculating in Wall Street, Fleischmann reluctantly agreed to contribute twenty-five thousand dollars and office space in a building he owned on West Forty-fifth Street.

While trying to raise the remaining twenty-five thousand dollars, Ross went ahead and assembled a small staff. He also badgered his Round Table friends to suggest a name for his magazine. Among those under consideration were
Manhattan, New York Weekly, Our Town
, and
Truth
but none of them sounded quite right. Then one day, when press agent John Peter Toohey was lunching with them at the Round Table, the subject came up again. Looking up idly from his plate, he asked what kind of magazine Ross had in mind. A magazine about New York, Ross told him. Well, Toohey replied, then call it
The New Yorker
, and he returned to his meal.

An elated Ross wrote a prospectus, a model of simplicity and clarity, that described the kind of reader he wished to reach and the kind he did not: “
The New Yorker
will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about.” No disrespect was intended “but
The New Yorker
is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience....” By this time, Raoul Fleischmann was developing cold feet; he had checked with a number of experienced publishers who warned him that he had been impulsive and, in fact, rather foolish. Ross had gulled him. Increasingly disturbed, he complained as if he had been the victim of a scam. To pacify him, Ross needed to acquire some impressive window dressing for his project, and he needed it quickly. He hastily assembled a board of editors that included Dorothy, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, Aleck Woollcott, and George Kaufman. In this raid on the Round Table, he was unable to get Frank Adams and Heywood Broun because they were under contract to the
World
, and Benchley and Sherwood had contracts with
Life
that would not permit their association with a rival publication. After a short time, Ferber and Woollcott withdrew because they were reluctant to have their names associated with a magazine doomed to failure.

Ever since Dorothy learned that Ross was intending to publish a sophisticated magazine, she had been smiling because he seemed wildly miscast in such a role. For most of the years she had known him, he’d been editing the
American Legion Weekly
, whose readers probably were the old men in Dubuque. In recent months, he had been working for the humor magazine
Judge
, but not so long ago she had heard him talking about starting a shipping newspaper, something he had referred to as the
Marine Gazette
. In her opinion, he was “almost illiterate,” a wild man who had “never read anything and didn’t know anything.” His ignorance was a Grand Canyon among ignorances, so deep that one was compelled to admire it for its sheer size. Never would she forget the evening he took her to see Nazimova in
The Cherry Orchard
. “At first he sat silent. Then he said, and over and over throughout the evening, in the all-but-voiceless voice of one who comes suddenly upon a trove of shining treasure, ‘Say, this is quite a play—quite a play!’ He had not seen it before. He had not heard of it.”

With this “monolith of unsophistication” at its helm, the future of
The New Yorker
augured poorly. Allowing Ross to use her name for his advisory board may have been a fraud (“the only dishonest thing I ever did,” he said later about this phony board) but it meant nothing to Dorothy, who was preoccupied with
Soft Music
. Unlike Ferber and Woollcott, she didn’t particularly care if her name was connected with a flop. Ross explained that the advisory board might be called upon to offer editorial advice or contribute an occasional piece, but he warned that payment was out of the question. He planned to reimburse writers with stock in his company. He also wanted contributors to write under pseudonyms so that the magazine would be able to project a unique character.

Hearing all this, Dorothy reacted by speedily putting Ross’s New Yorker out of her thoughts.

In July, after Benchley returned to the city, Dorothy amused herself by accompanying him to the brothel operated by Polly Adler on West Fifty-fourth Street. The idea of drinking champagne in a bawdy house delighted her and she liked Polly. So did Benchley, who opened a charge account and began keeping a black kimono there. Though he played backgammon with the madam for the services of her women, which were currently going for twenty dollars a throw, he had begun thinking of Polly’s as a second home where he slept or even worked. Polly Adler was devoted to Benchley, who, she said, “lighted up my life like the sun.” She made certain that he received the finest treatment. In the mornings, he woke to find that Polly’s personal maid, Lion, had pressed his suit, washed his socks and underwear, and was waiting to serve him breakfast in bed.