Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (28 page)

Her original idea was to write about her family and to set the opening of the novel in her early life, perhaps in the period of her father’s marriage to Eleanor Lewis or possibly later at the time of his death, the two events that she considered of the greatest consequence. The first of these themes concerns a child of five, modeled on herself, who has been adopted by a wealthy childless couple. The mother is a terrible figure, an oblivious woman who is determined to squeeze all the life out of the child, not from misdirected affection but rather from her own gross character defects and her inability to love.

The second theme draws on her father’s last years. The Old Gentleman, as she calls him, lives with one of his two daughters, exploits her shamefully, and appears indifferent to the hardship he has brought into her existence. He is, admittedly, ill, but he also is excessively selfish and tyrannical. The mood of the writing is as somber as the mustard-colored wallpaper and the heavy, tapestried furniture in the daughter’s parlor. Other characters bear resemblances to Helen and George Droste and to Bert Rothschild and his wife, Tiny. There also is a sketch of Dorothy’s oldest brother, Harry. Unwilling to offend Bert or Helen, she took pains to disguise them. She added twenty years to her father’s age and made him eighty-four at his death. It almost seems as if the portrait drew from an even earlier time when her grandfather Thomas Marston had lived with the Rothschilds, but it is not likely that she actually remembered any details about this period.

After sitting all day at her typewriter, she felt entitled to spend her evenings drinking Scotch and socializing with Round Tablers who owned summer homes in the area. A short drive away was the ninety-seven-acre farm that Ruth Hale had purchased with her own money and named Sabine Farm, after Horace’s estate in the Sabine Hills outside Rome. The only word for Ruth’s place was
squalid
. The two-hundred-year-old house was a wreck, not at all like Deems’s home, where his skill as a carpenter had created at least a facsimile of civilization. Sabine Farm, recalled Ruth’s son Woodie Broun, “looked as Horace’s place must have looked after the Goths, Gauls, and Vandals had passed over it several times.” Dorothy, disgusted at the sight of a brown, worn-out toothbrush in the bathroom, had refused to acknowledge the possibility that Ruth might actually be using it to clean her teeth and insisted that it must be a broomstick she rode on Halloween. In addition to Ruth, Murdock Pemberton lived in a second house on her property, Heywood Broun had bought a place down the road, and Peggy Wood and John Weaver owned land in North Stamford.

One evening at Ruth’s, they were sitting around the fire drinking with actor Ed McNamara. Dorothy was talking about Deems when she saw a pack of rats come running out of the wall like Olympic gold medalists, pounce on something, and then speed away. Breaking off her story, she stiffened with horror. Although she loved all animals and could put up with the most eccentric behavior so long as a creature walked on four legs, she had never cared for rats and in fact feared them. When she looked over at Ruth and McNamara, they were paying no attention to the rats. They were just sitting there calmly and smiling as they waited for her to continue. A few minutes later, the rats again came sprinting toward her, until they were just a few feet away. She was sure they could not be real; on the other hand, she had not drunk enough to be experiencing the DTs. After she finished her anecdote, she said, “Does anyone but myself see giant rats in this room?”

Ruth and Ed had been planning to say, “What rats, Dottie?” but a glance at her stricken face changed their minds. They confessed that they had been summoning the famished rats by quietly tossing bread pellets against the wall.

Several times she visited New York to look after her business affairs. For a change she was making money.
Close Harmony
, after reviews that compared her to George Kelly, was now in its third month in Chicago and doing excellent business. In New York,
Business Is Business
could be seen at the Criterion Theatre with
Beggar on Horseback
. On one of her trips to the city, she ran into Eddie, whom she had seen little of since his return to Hartford. In a jubilant mood, he told her that he was making money in Wall Street and had in fact cleaned up seven thousand dollars during the previous week. When he insisted on buying her a gift, she agreed to accept a dog, a seven-week-old Airedale she took with her back to the farm. On another trip she bumped into Harold Ross, who was in a far from jubilant mood. He was struggling to keep
The New Yorker
going with a tiny, inexperienced staff and an office that had only one typewriter. In August, circulation fell to twenty-seven hundred copies. Ross said, “I thought you were coming into the office to write a piece last week. What happened?”

Dorothy replied, “Somebody was using the pencil.”

At the end of July, she was in the city to greet Benchley, who returned alone from Europe. In an unhappy, cranky mood, he complained about the sticky weather and wished he had remained in Cap d’Antibes with his family. Dorothy planned to stay for the weekend, just long enough for a reunion with her best pal, but she hung around until the following Wednesday. She attended a few shows, even though everything she saw looked stale, and she spent many hours at Tony Soma’s with Benchley, catching him up on her news and listening to his stories of good times in Paris with Don Stewart and a likeable friend of Stewart’s, a newspaper stringer by the name of Ernest Hemingway. At Tony’s one night, she learned that Frank Sullivan was struggling to find material for The Conning Tower while F.P.A. was on his honeymoon. She mailed him two poems the next day. “If you can’t use these, give them to some poor family,” she wrote Sullivan, who was greatly moved by her generosity because The Conning Tower paid nothing for verse.

On this trip, she spent time with Charles MacArthur, whose new girlfriend, Helen Hayes, was away on tour. After dining together one night, they made a circuit of the speakeasies, the consumption of innumerable highballs constituting an evening’s entertainment for both of them. As the evening progressed, they began to quarrel. Charlie, as Benchley later told his wife, “bawled the life out of her.” His condemnation proved more than she could bear, because the following day she hurried back to Stamford and told Taylor that she felt like killing herself.

Frank and Esther Adams, who had just returned from Italy, appeared on Saturday and insisted that she go for a drive with them to visit actress Fay Bainter. Dorothy was in good form that afternoon. When Bainter expressed affection for her husband and mentioned that she had been married seven years, Dorothy replied, “Don’t worry, he’ll come back in style again.” Despite the jokes, she continued to feel depressed.

As the summer drew to a close, Dorothy was forced to acknowledge that her affair with Taylor had reached its conclusion because Mary Kennedy Taylor returned from Europe and Deems began to see her again. Appearing to accept this turn of events, Dorothy bowed out gracefully. Since she and the Taylors socialized in the same circles and could hardly avoid each other, their relations remained cordial. The following year the Taylors had a child, and their marriage survived until the mid-1930s.

Chapter 9

GLOBAL DISASTERS

1926

BARTENDER: What are you having?
PARKER: Not much fun.

All around people seemed to be having fun, but recently Dorothy had begun to suspect that there might be a “flaw in paganism” and even thought she knew what it might be:

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)

After returning from Stamford, she continued to feel as low as mud. She drank more but with an aggressive quality that had not been present before. At Tony’s, she started out by ordering Scotch with plain water, then called back the waiter and defiantly switched her order to straight Scotch, which she swallowed with alarming speed. Touchy and foul-tempered, she bit off people’s heads. When Johnny Weaver remarked that he was glad to see her looking so well, she snapped, “Where the hell are you looking?”

Her friends had seen her in bad shape, but never like this, when it took so little to kindle her rage. People, she wrote, “can say what they like about me,” but they should remember that she was not a troublemaker. “I make my own living, and I don’t have to ask favors off of anybody.” If trusted friends chose to insult her, they knew what they could do and where they could do it. “Tiffany’s window, see?” Into these diatribes she injected bits of autobiography about her heart murmur, the respectability of her upbringing, and the handsome houses her family had owned, vague references that were more relevant than anyone suspected. Finally she would subside, whispering that she wished she were dead.

Whenever friends named the things she might live for, she refused to listen. “When she would be really blue,” said Allen Saalburg,

she would begin talking about how worthless life was. Marc [Connelly] once got down on his knees and took her hands in his. He started telling her how valuable she was, how wonderful life could be, how everybody had troubles, and she should cheer up. She didn’t say anything, but after he had left she said, “What a silly old fool.” And she was right. He had been sort of silly, because he overplayed it in a theatrical way. Nothing he’d said were the things that might have impressed her.

Knowing that she was edging close to danger scared her. The story that she began to write was an almost-verbatim account of her irascible behavior and an apology for it, an attempt to articulate her mood and an effort to dissipate it. In a speakeasy at three in the morning, a woman wearing a petunia-colored hat is overheard throwing a fit as she unleashes a tearful monologue, the gist of which seems to be that life is not worth living. She is good and drunk. Her companion, a man described as owning ice-blue hair and who probably was a thinly disguised portrait of Seward Collins, keeps trying to placate her but is unable to get a word in. In this story, she was eager to put a comic face on her fears. Harold Ross thought that “Dialogue at Three in the Morning” was amusing enough to publish in
The New Yorker
for, on its most superficial level, as a portrait of a drunk wallowing in willful self-pity and paranoia, it had meaning for Prohibition readers.

At a party one night, Peggy Leech introduced her to a doctor she was dating. Alvan Barach was thirty, an earnest young intern from Newcastle, Pennsylvania, who had taken his degree at Columbia Medical School, read Bergson and Goethe, and wrote poetry and fiction as a hobby. In 1925 Barach had yet to begin his lifelong specialty in pulmonary medicine and his work leading to the development of the oxygen tent. He taught at Columbia and privately practiced psychotherapy. In spite of his attraction to the Algonquin writers, he felt somewhat out of place. His idea of cocktail-party conversation was a discussion of Tolstoy’s ideas; theirs was not. During the evening, he rose up and initiated a comparison of Dostoyevsky with Tolstoy that provoked indulgent smiles from Woollcott and the others, who thought he was laying it on a bit thick. Undeterred by their amusement and Marc Connelly’s repeated interruptions, Barach pressed on without taking offense. Dorothy observed him approvingly. His manner had a purposefulness that impressed her; she called his office the next morning to make an appointment for a consultation.

Barach decided that she had a lot of “tender expectancies” that were not being fulfilled, but the problem in need of most urgent attention was her drinking, which he felt had reached pathological proportions. While he tried to emphasize the subject in their sessions, he was met with almost total resistance. Dorothy found it impossible to participate in any productive way. As is often the case at the beginning of psychiatric treatment, her symptoms became exacerbated and she felt more depressed than ever. Yesterdays blurred into todays and she forgot the day of the week. Drinking no longer produced an automatic high. In fact, she now had to work at it, increasing the dosage to get the same sensation. What frightened her most were those times when the effects of the whisky suddenly deserted her without warning and she would be swamped by anxiety so powerful that she seemed to be sinking in her tracks, literally unable to move forward or backward. She felt misery was crushing her “between great smooth stones.” Terrified to discover that Scotch could not be trusted, she began to view it as an old friend who had inexplicably refused to do her a simple favor.

As she drifted from drink to drink, her anguish mounting, she also had to deal with parting from the dog Eddie had brought for her. The Airedale kept growing until she joked about entering him in a horse show. Even more troublesome was his habit of eating the Algonquin’s furniture. Dorothy called him “a veritable addict” who could make a whole meal out of a sofa and when he ran out of sofa turned to a chintz-covered arm chair for a light snack. “It was eventually decided—and maybe you think that tears weren’t shed over that decision!—that he was not the dog for apartment existence.” She presented him to friends in the country, but felt miserable over the loss.