Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (33 page)

Dorothy arrived at Municipal Court the next morning, August 11, to discover the hallway outside the courtroom jammed with yesterday’s prisoners. They were flipping through the morning papers in search of news of their arrests and singing “The Internationale.” The corridor sounded like a musical version of
Potemkin,
with courthouse guards breaking in periodically with a chorus of “shut ups.” Several comrades brought Dorothy papers showing photographs of herself and John Dos Passos. Not only had they made the headlines, but she was disgusted to notice that some papers had allotted them almost as much space as they had Sacco and Vanzetti.

She pleaded guilty and received a five-dollar fine for loitering and sauntering.

Several days later, Dorothy and Ruth were at the dock when Vanzetti’s sister, Luiga, arrived on the
Aquitania
. It was clear at once that Luiga would be worthless to the defense; she had only come, she said, to guide her brother back to the Catholic faith so that he would be prepared to meet his maker.

Dorothy remained briefly in New York, trying to persuade her friends to join the protesters. She had no trouble talking Sewie into contributing thirty-five hundred dollars, which was used to purchase full-page ads in
The New York Times
and other major papers. Benchley had already testified before the Lowell Committee about an indiscreet remark of Judge Thayer’s in the Worcester Golf Club locker room; later, he filed a writ of protest with the court. Heywood Broun used his
World
column to write movingly on behalf of the condemned men, and Ruth Hale was as deeply involved with the defense committee as Dorothy was. Don Stewart wasn’t interested and made no attempt to understand. Dorothy found the indifferent behavior of other friends extremely vexing. “Those people at the Round Table didn’t know a bloody thing. They thought we were fools to go up and demonstrate for Sacco and Vanzetti.” She supposed them ignorant because “they didn’t know and they just didn’t think about anything but the theater.” That was no excuse in her opinion.

On her return to Boston, she spent long hours at Hanover Street helping with whatever tasks needed to be done. She worked in the back room, where Gardner “Pat” Jackson was always typing at the long oak table, and soon developed a little-girl crush on the tweedily handsome Coloradan who had been a reporter on the
Boston Globe
. Since the opportunity for personal conversation was limited, and she was too shy to approach him directly, she dropped breathless notes full of superlatives into his lap as she left the room. Pat Jackson was, she wrote, a very great human being, precisely the kind of perfect man she had always wanted to spend her life with. “These adoring businesses,” as Jackson described the notes, were embarrassing and he did not reciprocate because, “I had my work to do.”

Plenty of visitors milled through the office. The weekend before the new execution date saw the arrival of a number of prominent writers: Susan Glaspell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary Heaton Vorse, Upton Sinclair, and Katherine Anne Porter. John Dos Passos returned. They picketed the State House, got themselves arrested, and defense headquarters promptly bailed them out at twenty-five dollars each. It had become almost a routine.

Throughout the day, the defense workers sometimes drank to steady their nerves, and each evening they tottered out to eat spicy spaghetti at one of the Italian restaurants along Hanover Street. Mother Gaboni’s, third floor back, was rated the best. Mother Gaboni, a fine cook, had two bootlegger sons and served big jugs of home-made red wine. Since red wine gave Dorothy a mighty high, she jokingly referred to it as the “Red Badge of Courage.”

The pressroom felt like an oven because all the windows had been nailed shut for fear a bomb would be thrown in. At eleven o’clock Dorothy telephoned Pat Jackson to tell him that there was a rumor, erroneous as it turned out, that the killings might be held up. As Jackson remembered it, on the night of the execution Dorothy “was able to get admitted to the prison for last words with Sacco and Vanzetti,” but this memory is confirmed by no other source. Near twelve-thirty, the Associated Press reporter who had been chosen by lot to witness the electrocutions returned to the pressroom with the details. “No features,” he announced. “Entirely colorless.” Neither man had confessed. Sacco’s last words were “
Viva L’anarchia!”
and somebody asked if
anarchia
was spelled with a
k.
Vanzetti shook hands with everyone, then like a gentleman thanked the warden for his many courtesies, and lastly said he forgave everyone. Correction: He forgave some people.

The insensitive remarks of the reporters seared Dorothy: “The little infant Jesus!” “Ain’t they lambs, those Reds?” Listening to them sickened her.

At Hanover Street, the telephone rang and rang, but nobody picked it up. Finally, the rooms were hushed. Dorothy sat with Jackson, Vanzetti’s friend Aldino Felicani, and a few others. None of them spoke. For a long time they sat staring at their knees. Then, Jackson hoisted himself up and said he was going for a walk. Felicani followed him.

After a while Dorothy staggered down the stairs. The empty street in the gray hour between night and morning breathed coldness. It was August 23. The day before had been her thirty-fourth birthday.

During the autumn after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, new people entered her life, and because they contrasted so strongly with what she had witnessed, she welcomed them. The ideas she had heard in Boston had struck a live nerve somewhere, and now she began proudly calling herself a socialist. “My heart and soul are with the cause of socialism,” she announced. The odd choice of company she began to keep did not reflect her politics however. Some of her new friends were bankers and Wall Street businessmen, some of them millionaires, but all of them conspicuous capitalists whose political consciousness had not been raised. Although Dorothy still had the run of the Swopes’ place and regularly visited other estates along Long Island’s North Shore, she got to know the new bunch through Benchley and Stewart: John Hay “Jock” Whitney, his sister, Joan Whitney Payson, Pierpont and Marise Morgan, and Robert and Adele Lovett.

These attractive, moneyed socialites found the circles in which they had grown up too stuffy for their tastes. Amusing writers like Dorothy and Benchley were much in demand. Their talent and gaiety were considered charming, and their company welcomed in drawing rooms and on trips. The previous spring, Jock Whitney had taken Benchley to see the Grand National in England. Stewart and Benchley liked this crowd very much. Dorothy, who tended to trust their judgment, went along with these associations, which she would later deride as products of the natural social-climbing instincts of indigent writers. Still, these friendships had undeniable advantages because the rich could be generous suppliers of cottages on their estates for little or no rent, memberships in racquet and tennis clubs, and gifts of money and stocks.

Dorothy’s closest friend in the group was Adele Quartley Brown Lovett, daughter of investment banker James Brown, wife of Robert A. Lovett (a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman & Company and secretary of Defense in the 1950s), and mother of two children. Famous for her dinner parties, Adele Lovett was a witty and elegant blond clotheshorse who cultivated the Round Table writers and made a big effort to befriend Dorothy. Dorothy gave the impression of reciprocating Adele Lovett’s esteem for several years, even dedicating a book to her, although Adele and her Brahmin manners grated on her nerves. Finally, as an indignant Lovett said herself, she “dropped us like hot potatoes.” The truth was that Dorothy tolerated her wealthy friends and even gave the appearance of enjoying their company. There was a wonderful tawdriness to be found in their drawing rooms, where she was sure to meet “over-eager portrait-painters, playwrights of dubious sexes, professional conversationalists, and society ladies not yet quite divorced.” Their stupidities were of course ideal targets for all manner of wisecracks and gossip. Dorothy appreciated the rich for their houses, cars, servants, and clothes, but, with a few exceptions, she invariably found them dull, silly, and almost totally ignorant.

About this time she met John Wiley Garrett II, an investment banker with the private banking firm of Hallgarten & Company. Garrett was the same age as Dorothy, although she sometimes described him as “a very good-looking young man indeed,” or as “a graceful young man ever carefully dropping references to his long, unfinished list of easy conquests,” so that it seemed as though he were significantly younger. He was born on December 3, 1893, in St. Louis, attended the Kent School, and graduated from Williams College in 1915. During the war, he served in France as a captain in the 103rd Field Artillery, and immediately afterward began working in Wall Street. He sailed and played golf and tennis, and he belonged to The Leash and Downtown Association and the American Legion. Politically he was about as far right as he could get, a stereotype of a reactionary Republican. (During the Depression, Edmund Wilson remembered him as someone upon whom he might base a fictional character who thought President Hoover was doing a fine job.)

Dorothy broke off with Seward Collins and fell in love with John Garrett, who looked like a romantic lover and had a voice as “intimate as the rustle of sheets.”

On October 1, she took over the “Recent Books” column in
The New Yorker
, under the pseudonym “Constant Reader.” Need of money was her reason for assuming the responsibility of a regular weekly assignment. She started out cautiously and the reviews were relatively benign during the early weeks. As a reviewer, she did poorly with quality books, usually slopping adjectives like “beautiful” and “exquisite” all over the page. By the end of the first month, reviewing a memoir by President Warren Harding’s mistress and the mother of his illegitimate child, Dorothy had worked herself into a properly bilious mood. An effort had been made to suppress Nan Britton’s creation because police had invaded the printing plant to seize the plates. “Lady,” Dorothy was dying to tell the author, “those weren’t policemen; they were critics of literature dressed up.”

It was the rare column that did not contain something to make readers laugh:
Crude
is the name of Robert Hyde’s first novel, she reported. “It is also a criticism of it.” Margot Asquith’s latest book, she chortled, has “all the depth and glitter of a worn dime,” and she went on to speculate that “the affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.” Dorothy was probably at her most pugilistic with how-to books. Confronted with a work about happiness, titled
Happiness
and written by a Yale professor, she described the book as

second only to a rubber duck as the ideal bathtub companion. It may be held in the hand without causing muscular fatigue or nerve strain, it may be neatly balanced back of the faucets, and it may be read through before the water has cooled. And if it slips down the drain pipe, all right, it slips down the drain pipe.

Constant Reader’s best-known review was of A. A. Milne’s
The House at Pooh Corner
. Milne’s whimsy had always nauseated her. When she came to the word
hummy,
her stomach revolted. “And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings,” she wrote, “that marks the first place in
The House at Pooh
Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.”

Almost from the outset, she set a precedent of being late with her copy, which was due at
The New Yorker
on Fridays. On Sunday mornings, someone from the magazine would telephone. Dorothy, reassuring, said that the column was finished except for the last paragraph and promised to have it for them within the hour. Throughout the day, the same routine would be repeated several times. Occasionally, she would claim she had just ripped up the column because it was awful. At that point, she would start writing.

She joked that her lateness was unavoidable because she had to begin a column by typing her name and address in the upper left hand corner of the paper (if it did not look perfect she would retype it sometimes as often as eleven times) and because she first had to study the typewriter keyboard to see how many words could be formed from the letters in the word Corona (fifteen if she used the dictionary). Naturally, time flitted by like a steam-roller, and the first thing she knew the morning was shot and the noon whistles were blowing. The whistles meant lunchtime for most people, but not for her because, “I have an editor. I have an overdraft at the bank. I have a pain in the eye.”

While she was unquestionably accomplished when it came to stalling, the missed deadlines at this time were due to the fact that she had undertaken more work than she could comfortably complete. In this period of fertility, when not even an attack of mumps slowed her down, she wrote some of her best stories, among them “Arrangement in Black and White,” a rather bold attack on racism that appeared in
The New Yorker,
and the comic but deadly serious monologue she called “A Telephone Call,” published in
The Bookman
. She continued to produce verse, and she also agreed to accept a second regular assignment, an editorial column for
McCall’s
that required her to write a chatty personal essay about New York or any subject she cared to write about each month.