Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (26 page)

Because your eyes are slant and slow,
Because your hair is sweet to touch,
My heart is high again; but oh,
I doubt if this will get me much.

Even though she felt drawn toward men with money, she secretly abominated them and undertook it as her mission to punish them, even those she genuinely liked, even those who worked hard for their money. Her attitude toward these men can be summed up in her treatment of Frank Case, the manager of the Algonquin Hotel, whom she seldom bothered to pay for her suite. She convinced herself that her presence was good publicity for the hotel, that in fact Case should feel fortunate to have her living there rent-free. One Christmas when friends asked if she planned to hang up a stocking, she said, “No, but I’m going to hang up Frank Case,” which she had, in fact, been doing all year.

She also derived satisfaction from hanging up wealthy men, thinking of them as rich Neanderthals who could well afford to pay for the privilege of being seen around town with one of New York’s most sought-after women. There were times, however, when her gorge rose and she could not control her contempt. At Ralph Pulitzer’s estate in Manhasset one evening, she stared for a long while at the face of a man sitting across from her. Then she turned to her friend Peggy Leech and blurted out, “He looks just like a pig, doesn’t he, Peggy?”

Donald Stewart thought that any man who got emotionally involved with Dorothy “would have found out, little by little, that she wasn’t really there.” At first this wouldn’t be apparent because she was always so much fun to be with, but eventually it would become clear that “it was
her
emotion; she was not worrying about
your
emotion.” While striking fancy poses and whipping herself into an emotional frenzy got her adrenaline moving, that white-hot heat also served a serious purpose; it generated salable verse and enabled her to deposit checks into her bank account. In this respect, she was no more calculating than Scott Fitzgerald who, in April, published his novel
The Great Gatsby
, which he had extracted from his and Zelda’s eighteen-month residence in Great Neck. His characters were modeled on people he had met at the Swopes’, who were some of the very same men winding up in Dorothy’s bed at the Algonquin and, eventually, in her verse. Both Dorothy and Fitzgerald were adept at sucking the juices out of people. All those pretty playboys had their practical uses. Once she had melted down and recycled them, they behaved much like men in Pasadena or Tulsa and were instantly recognizable to readers of her verse.

In the humorous verse she wrote in the mid-twenties, men were little loves who sweetly, if naïvely, presented her with “one perfect rose,” never considering that she might instead have preferred a good solid Rolls-Royce. Like exotic insects under glass, men became her subject of special study. She was prepared to announce conclusions about the entire species. Men were incapable of passing up a speakeasy, a poker game, or a golf course, which meant that they often neglected to call at the precise time they had promised, while women wasted their time waiting for them. In fact it sometimes seemed that “all your life you wait around for some damn man!” Furthermore: They were seldom capable of experiencing sexual attraction for a woman who wore glasses, unable to suppress their boasting about others with whom they slept, and perhaps most distressing, totally incapable of accepting a woman as she was. When younger, Dorothy wrote, she had done her best to indulge men in their fantasies, had even tried to change herself to suit their rattlebrained theories. Now, in her thirties, she understood that if you scratched a lover you would find a foe. It was safest, therefore, to look upon the male sex as a temporary entertainment because

By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying—
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

In the winter of 1925 it was she who was doing most of the lying.

“YESSIR, THE WHADDYECALL’EM BLUES”
That year, Seward Collins fell in love with a cabaret singer named Lee Morse from her phonograph records, and then contrived to meet her. Her big hit was “Yessir, the Whaddyecall’em Blues.” Even though her fans liked hot tunes, she preferred romantic ballads, some of which she wrote herself. One night after a party Collins took Bunny Wilson and his wife, Mary, and several other friends to the club where Lee Morse was singing, and they wound up drinking unidentifiable, practically undrinkable liquor that was served in ginger ale bottles. When Lee Morse joined them, she confided to Mary Wilson and Alice Seldes that she was waiting for a marriage proposal from Sew, not because she planned to accept but because she wanted to be asked. Alice, knowing the twenty-six-year-old Collins to be an immature and vulnerable bachelor, warned him about Lee Morse. Before long, however, Collins stopped seeing her because he had fallen in love with Dorothy.

Seward, always called Sew or Sewie, was born in Pasadena in 1899, into a well-to-do family who owned a chain of cigar stores. They sent him to Princeton where he became friends with Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. In 1920, after Wilson took over Benchley’s job at Vanity Fair, he brought in Collins as a regular contributor. Later, when Wilson moved to
The New Republic
, he continued to assign articles to Collins, whose background and liberal political views paralleled his own. By the time Collins met Dorothy, he was eager to use his wealth to further his publishing ambitions and was negotiating to buy a literary journal called
The Bookman.
His claim to fame fell into the area of sexology rather than literature because he owned a collection of obscene English literature said to be the largest in the world.

Collins took extreme pride in his erotica, although those who remember it say that by today’s standards it would be rated tame. What it lacked in sophistication, it more than made up for in quantity, for he was a compulsive buyer. A spectacular number of boxes and trunks were stored at his country house in Connecticut. The really wild items he kept in his Manhattan apartment, which was a virtual gallery of old and new masters. Running into Sewie at a speakeasy, Marc Connelly remembered, generally meant an invitation to stop by later for a nightcap and a look. It was not uncommon for Collins to arrange formal showings, where he would display recent acquisitions.

Dorothy had known Collins casually for several years but paid him slight attention. Not only was he six years her junior, but he was undistinguished physically, being of medium height and pale, mousy coloring. He had an ingratiating smile and was a talker, which annoyed some people, but his friends found him witty and amusing. When Edmund Wilson drew up an imaginary guest list for an ideal party, he put Sewie and Dorothy near the top.

Despite Collins’s infatuation with Lee Morse, he was very much aware of Dorothy, very admiring, and flirted discreetly. His interest in sexology did not mean he personally was sexually emancipated. In contrast to Benchley, for example, who was too busy copulating to gaze at pictures of people doing it, Collins was strictly a spectactor who, according to Marc Connelly, always comported himself like a gentleman around women and who behaved “like a nice guy.” Nice guys did not impress Dorothy.

That spring he backed her into a corner at a party and smothered her with excessive compliments. He seemed exactly the sort of man she had meant when she wrote, in “Experience,” that “some men fawn and flatter.” Not long after that, someone at
The Bookman,
Collins no doubt, enthused over the prettiest spring hat in New York. “It was on the head of no less a beautiful person than the pleasant Dorothy Parker, maker of plays and verses and dramatic criticism. It was large and low and green—pale green, along the side was a sheaf of pussy willows. There’s a hat to square yourself with, sir.” Seeing Dorothy’s intense eyes next to the pussy willows knocked all thoughts of Lee Morse out of his head for good.

The Bookman
also reported that Dorothy was working on a play and would soon embark on a novel, inaccurate information supplied by Dorothy herself. On the evening she had blabbed all this to Collins, the night she was wearing the pussy willow hat, she had been in the company of Elinor Wylie. She had spoken about a new novel she had started, and Dorothy, not wishing to be outdone, had fabricated a fictitious work schedule on the spot. She couldn’t get rid of Collins fast enough. He was one of those naïfs who assumed writers must always be busy writing, just as dentists were forever drilling. Routine though his questions may have been he greatly irritated her.

Meanwhile, the first issue of
The New Yorker
was published on February 21. Jane Grant admitted that she and Ross were “not proud” of its debut. F.P.A. expressed disappointment: “To H. Ross’s, and he showed me a copy of the New Yorker, which is to be issued on Tuesday, but most of it seemed too frothy for my liking.” James Thurber called it, without exaggerating, “the outstanding flop of 1925.” Ross had been expecting his board of editors to help out with contributions and found their lack of assistance disheartening. The first issue appeared without the Round Tablers, nor were they present in succeeding issues. The single exception was Dorothy, who contributed drama reviews for the first two issues under the byline “Last Night.” Despite the pseudonym, there is no doubt of their authorship: “... we bashfully admit that we wept, and lavishly; but on the other hand, it is but fair to admit that we are that way. All you have to do is drop a hat, and if we are in any kind of form we will break down and cry like a little tired child.”

For the second issue, again out of the goodness of her heart, she turned in another theater review, as well as a poem, “Cassandra Drops Into Verse,” and a short story, “A Certain Lady.” Then, except for some unsigned verse in July, she was not heard from until September, when she sent in the poem “Rainy Night.”

During the
The New Yorker
’s first year, she regarded her contributions as charitable donations, certainly not what she considered serious work. In any case, she wanted to be paid.

Writing, she decided, was turning out to be a nasty profession. “And what do you do, Mrs. Parker. Oh, I write. There’s a hot job for a healthy woman.” It was a pity she hadn’t the foresight to have taken a course in interior decorating, she said. Why anybody would choose a career as a writer mystified her, and she swore that if she had a choice she would prefer to clean out ferry boats, peddle fish, or be a Broadway chorus boy. The problem was, “I wish I didn’t have to work at all. I was made for love, anyway.” Since that was not to be, she wished that she knew how to write prose that would earn a lot of money. Poetry was not the answer. “This is a fine thing to be doing, at my age, sitting here making up sissy verses about broken hearts and that tripe,” and getting a dollar a line for it. What she actually wanted was payment “in chunks, not drips.”

Despite her jokes, the painful truth was that sometimes she found herself exceedingly hard up. “She was ignorant about money,” a friend said. “All she knew was that she needed it.” Given her attraction-repulsion about money, the way she went about practicing economies was peculiarly her own. She continued to give the Algonquin IOUs in lieu of her rent. Since she was always asked out to dinner, meals were not a problem. She was even able to arrange the expense of entertaining so that it cost her nothing but the price of club soda and ice. Most afternoons around five, people came in for drinks. A frequent visitor at the ritual cocktail hour was painter Allen Saalburg, who would drop in with his wife, the fashion designer Muriel King. “Dottie needed to have people around her all the time but she never had any money. So everybody would bring a bottle and put it down some place, to show they had earned their right to be there. She welcomed almost anybody.”

Her chief expenses were for necessities: clothing, perfume, Johnny Walker cigarettes, and liquor. And now she hired a part-time maid. Ivy (whose surname has been lost) was a young black woman who supported herself and a small son. She was said to be an accomplished cook, but, since Dorothy seldom ate at home, she had no use for Ivy’s culinary skills. In the morning Ivy would arrive and brew coffee. If Dorothy was still asleep, as was generally the case, Ivy moved softly around the suite, tidying up the dirty glasses from the previous evening and washing and ironing Dorothy’s designer nightgowns. By noon, she was ready to move on to her other employers. Sometimes, if Dorothy was giving a more formal cocktail party, Ivy would return to pass drinks. While she seems to have performed these minimal duties perfectly well—Dorothy swore she would never entrust her laundry to anyone else—Dorothy still professed to find her inadequate. It pleased her to have people around who lent themselves to dramatization, as Eddie had. For the moment, Ivy was the chosen one. With characteristic deviltry, Dorothy complained freely about her, until Ivy became infamous as a slovenly, abnormally inefficient horror whom Dorothy lacked the heart to discharge.

When Dorothy’s Boston terrier, Woodrow Wilson, died, she grieved extravagantly for him. He had reminded her of Rags, and after Eddie left, he had been her constant companion wherever she went. Although it could never be said that Dorothy had actually trained him, the dog had somehow learned to comport himself decorously in speakeasies, parlors, and offices. Though Woodrow Wilson’s passing left a gap in her life, she could not bring herself to take the disloyal step of replacing him.

Throughout the spring of 1925, restless and dissatisfied, she began to draw closer to the Round Tablers again. Benchley was often away. Frequent excursions to the hinterlands to deliver “The Treasurer’s Report” on the vaudeville circuit had become a necessity, because he had grown accustomed to earning a large salary, living a spendthrift life, and piling up debts. In his absence, Dorothy turned for companionship to Frank Adams, who was currently single again. Dorothy had always liked Minna Adams, a former “Floradora girl” who had been unable to bear children and instead babied her husband and her cat Mistah. Dorothy had taken no sides in their breakup.