Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (36 page)

When she began to feel better, she went on a shopping spree and bought a summer fur coat made of cream-colored unborn lamb, which had “all the warmth and durability of a sheet of toilet paper.” She also ordered a number of trailing chiffon dresses and stocked up on nightgowns, chemises, and slips with matching panties for herself as well as her sister. Afterward, looking at her purchases, she realized they were “some of the most ill-advised clothes ever assembled. They were just what somebody with an afflicted liver
would
have picked out.” Her most costly mistake proved to be the summer fur, which she would wear only four times before shipping it home to Helen, who had little use for it either.

At the end of June, Benchley arrived with his wife and children. Against her better judgment, Dorothy agreed to join them in a rented car on a grueling four-day journey to Antibes, where they planned to visit the Murphys. Around Gertrude, Benchley seemed strangely silent. “He simply can’t speak, in the presence of his bride, and who could? O my God,
what
a woman, oh, my God,
what
a woman!” She found it hard to believe he was the same man, so subdued was his behavior around his family. Before long, Nat and young Bub were driving her crazy. When Robert Junior had been a baby, Dorothy had been quite taken with his chubbiness and fondly nicknamed him Annie, because he reminded her of the Irish maid once employed by the Rothschilds. “Annie,” his baby fat gone, had matured into a normal, high-spirited ten-year-old who bickered and competed with his older brother. According to Benchley’s diary, crisis followed crisis: Dorothy left her passport in a restaurant, Timothy barked at every dog along the roadside, young Bub “gets in nettles making p.p.” The children’s rowdiness forced Benchley to offer a prize “to first boy not to be amusing.”

Gertrude regarded travel for children as an opportunity for education. Assuming the role of teacher and tour guide, she pointed out Roman ruins and conducted spelling contests. At one point, almost unhinged by the racket, Dorothy told Gertrude that she was considering surgery to reduce the size of her breasts. What prompted her to cook up such a peculiar confidence would be interesting to know. On the other hand, as she wrote to Aleck Woollcott, “I have a collection of Mrs. Benchleiana that will knock your justly prize right eye out.”

At Villa America, Sara and Gerald installed the Benchley family in one of their guest houses and put Dorothy and Timothy in the other, the bastide, which resembled a picture-book Normandy farmhouse with plumbing and electricity and exquisite decorations. It stood surrounded by fig trees laden with purple fruit, which was fine, she said, “except that I hate figs in any form.” The weather was glorious and suddenly Dorothy felt fired with “deferred health and twilit energy.” She began swimming two kilometers a day; she devoured the accounts of murders and dismemberings in the Nice papers; and she played with the Murphy children—eleven-year-old Honoria, eight-year-old Patrick, who had a stomach ailment requiring a special diet, and ten-year-old Baoth, who named a chicken after her. When the chicken turned out to be a rooster, Baoth shrugged philosophically and said, “What is that of difference?” Dorothy’s hair grew long and she began to gain weight.

From Antibes, Dorothy sent
The New Yorker
three poems and two short stories. She was barreling ahead on her novel, to which she had given the intriguing title
Sonnets in Suicide, or the Life of John Knox
. Numerous pages got torn up, and what was left failed to please her entirely but, she said, “it’s an awful pile of work, just the same.” Daily she prayed, “Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman. For Jesus Christ’s sake, amen.”

Among the old friends she saw were the Fitzgeralds, who had rented a villa near Cannes. Zelda, who seemed tired and more remote than usual, was gravitating toward her ultimate breakdown, but Dorothy was unaware of her problems. It was Scott, jittery, argumentative, and often obnoxiously drunk, who seemed to be in poor shape. Jealous of the hospitality that Sara and Gerald were lavishing on Dorothy, he wrote petulantly to Hemingway that the Murphys were putting on their most elaborate performance for her benefit but she didn’t seem to appreciate it.

At Villa America she was content to live quietly. Everyone told her that the Riviera social scene that summer was terrible because every “tripe” was there, including Rosie Dolly and Peggy Hopkins Joyce. Still, she never knew who might turn up. Adele Lovett came over for four days, just to see Benchley she claimed, but left in disgust because he was tied up with his family every minute. Jack Gilbert and Ina Claire arrived on their honeymoon. Benchley, walking along the street in Cannes, came face to face with his former mistress, who was in the company of her current boyfriend, and she cut him dead. That evening, shaken by the encounter, he managed to give Gertrude the slip, and he and Dorothy sallied forth to get “absolutely blotto.”

Dorothy had dutifully cut back on her drinking, but that night she got so drunk that she wound up in bed with a good-looking international polo star, the heir to a carpeting fortune. “The lucky man was Laddie Sanford,” she wrote Helen, “and we wouldn’t know each other even if we ever did see each other again. And I don’t even feel embarrassed about it, because I can’t tell you how little sex means to me now. Or at least I can’t tell you how little I think sex means to me now. And polo players wouldn’t count, anyway.”

Unfortunately, the drunken encounter with Sanford triggered her memories of John Garrett. Before leaving New York, despite her suspicion that he was involved with at least two other women, she felt pleased when he told her that he too would be in France that summer. She must cable her address so they might rendezvous somewhere for a week or two, he insisted. Although she read of his arrival in the
Paris Herald
, she failed to hear from him and finally wired to say she wished they could be friends. He responded with a collect telegram: DELIGHTED WIRE ALWAYS, three words whose studied ambiguity seemed downright spooky to her.

Knowing that he was close by and ignoring her shattered her earlier contentment. Sometimes Yvonne Roussel, tutor to the Murphy children, would catch sight of Dorothy in the garden “looking a little lost.” Suddenly she felt bewildered and miserable. “I don’t know how much I have built up for myself of his boyishness and gaiety and sweetness—even of his good looks. I honestly can’t remember what it was like to be alone with him; I couldn’t possibly recall any of our conversation.” She was mourning the loss of a fantasy, but a part of her enjoyed the unhappiness of her position, for she believed that a broken heart was no disgrace; indeed it was rather romantic.

In early August she checked her funds and was disagreeably surprised to discover she had only forty dollars left. She knew that Harold Guinzburg was in Paris with his wife, Alice, and she lost no time in speeding back there to discuss a further advance. To prove to Guinzburg how conscientious she had been, she brought along as much of the typed manuscript of
Sonnets in Suicide
as she had completed to date. Even though it was a stupendous stack of work, the partial manuscript began to look puny to Dorothy at the last moment, so that she decided to fatten it up by inserting carbons of old articles and letters from friends.

Dorothy was incapable of asking anyone for money. Pride would not allow her to beg. What she would do instead was to look woebegone, wring her hands, and confess that she simply had no idea what she was going to do because she was broke and feeling scared about it. What usually happened was that the offer of a loan would be forthcoming, which she could then be prevailed upon to accept. On this occasion, she managed to convey her predicament to Guinzburg, who sympathetically doled out an amount sufficient for her to remain in France and finish the book. Afterward, alone in the Paris flat loaned to her by the Saalburgs, a good dingy hovel she called it, she plunged into depression. She found herself “looking thoughtfully at the Seine,” although prior to that time she had never seriously considered suicide by drowning. In this agitated frame of mind, she began to torment herself and indulged in a bit of typical pathology—she made the mistake of sending Garrett a pleading letter that confessed her longing to see him and concluded by asking what she should do, as if she expected him to offer helpful advice.

His reply, another collect cable, could not have been more insulting: LOVED LETTER DEAR SO HAPPY YOU ARE WELL.

Young Patrick Murphy was gravely ill. In Dorothy’s absence, Villa America had been transformed from a paradisiacal retreat to a house of anxiety and horror when his affliction was diagnosed as tuberculosis. Later, the Murphys’ doctors traced the incubation of the disease back to February, when the family was living in Hollywood and employing a chauffeur who subsequently proved to be tubercular. Sara and Gerald were determined that their son must be cured, even though no known cure for tuberculosis existed at that time, only methods of prolonging the patient’s life by cold mountain air and a rich dairy diet. Just as they had poured their energies into creating a magical life for themselves, they began to rechannel that same passion for living well into a counterattack on a fatal illness. At once, they dismantled Villa America in preparation for moving their whole establishment—children, servants, and pets—to Montana-Vermala, a health resort for tuberculosis patients near Sierre in the Swiss Alps.

Dorothy prepared to return home, although she dreaded living in New York, where she seemed to do nothing but drink and entertain “horrible” people in the afternoons. During the weeks before the Murphys left, she traveled to Paris to interview Ernest Hemingway for a
New Yorker
profile.
A Farewell to Arms
had just been published to superlative reviews and had jumped to the top of the best-seller list. To her disgust, the restrictions he put on her made a decent story practically impossible. He would not permit her to mention his family in Oak Park, his divorce from Hadley, “or anything he ever did or said,” she later complained. In trying to respect his wishes, she was reduced to filling the space with compliments about his writing, but the gushy, fan-magazine tone of “The Artist’s Reward” was less her fault than Hemingway’s.

Her departure plans were suddenly revised when Sara and Gerald asked her to accompany them to Montana-Vermala, as a favor, because Sara found her a comfort to have around. Dorothy immediately cabled Benchley for advice, but “the big shit” was away or never answered or both, she said, “so I came anyhow.” That is what she guessed Benchley would have done. Staying was not in her best interests; in fact, it was probably the worst decision she could have made. The first project of hers to be abandoned was
Sonnets in Suicide
, even though she cabled Viking to assure Guinzburg that she was WORKING HARD, as if saying it would somehow make it true. He answered that he expected
Sonnets
to be a best seller and to mail the manuscript special delivery when it was completed and also include an autobiographical blurb for the dust jacket.

By the third week of October, the Murphys had vacated Villa America. Only Dorothy remained to gather up Timothy and the four Murphy dogs, plus the rest of the baggage, which consisted of eleven trunks and seventeen hand pieces, and follow along behind. Shepherding the baggage caravan entailed three changes of trains and the greasing of several palms to pass the animals through customs at Geneva, but otherwise she accomplished the trip without incident. She had always considered Switzerland “the home of horseshit,” she wrote Benchley, and saw no reason to revise her opinion. Montana-Vermala was built on the side of a “God damn Alp,” from which she had no idea how she would descend; before she risked her life a second time on the funicular, she would prefer to remain among the bacilli.

The Swiss Family Murphy, as she had dubbed them, were installed in a row of six rooms at the Palace Hotel (all the sanatoriums were called Splendide or Royale) and Dorothy’s room was located on the floor above. Standing on her terrace, staring at the peaks, she remembered how strongly she had always hated mountains. She overheard a woman in the next room dying audibly one night. Day or night, she froze because there was no way to keep warm. Indoor temperatures had to be maintained at practically subarctic levels for the patients. Dorothy’s pretty Parisian clothes remained in her trunk while she bundled up in tweed suit, overcoat, and woolen muffler. Out of doors, where it was warm in the sun, she removed either the coat or the mummer

Dorothy tried not to think about Harold Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer. When she received a panicky telegram from them saying that the spring catalogue was closing December 15 and they had to know immediately if
Sonnets in Suicide
would be ready, she did not reply.

Once the children were in bed at nights, Dorothy joined Sara and Gerald in their room, where Gerald had arranged a makeshift bar and would ceremoniously put out a bottle of wine, a bag of cinnamon, some lemons, and a spirit lamp. Huddled in their mufflers and talking in whispers because Patrick’s room was next door, they drank the wine out of hospital tumblers and spoke of past good times and absent friends, especially Benchley. “Ah, old Boogies Benchley,” Gerald sighed. “Ah, old imaginary good lucks. Let’s cable the old fool to come over.” On Sara’s birthday they celebrated with cake and champagne and presents for everybody, including dogs, canaries, and Coquette, the parrot Dorothy bought for the children, which turned out to be a vicious creature. Afterward Dorothy went back to her room and cried.

On alternating days, Patrick received pneumothorax treatments, a procedure in which a hollow needle was inserted through his ribs into the pleura and gas pumped through it to make the lung collapse, so that if one lung was isolated perhaps the other could be saved. The thought of it made Dorothy shudder. “Christ, think of all the shits in the world and then this happens to the Murphys!”