Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (45 page)

Woollcott and what remained of the defunct Round Table awaited Dorothy’s return to New York, perhaps anticipating the excitement on Broadway that would attend the fall opening of George Kaufman and Moss Hart’s new drama,
Merrily We Roll Along,
featuring a character named Julia Glenn, a wisecracking alcoholic—a woman you could talk to like a man. Word-of-mouth publicity identified her real-life counterpart as Dorothy Parker. Questioned by reporters, Kaufman admitted that there might be a trace of Mrs. Parker in the character, but he insisted he and Hart meant no offense.

Once again somebody had stolen her story. This time she could not complain that her character was distorted; the Kaufman and Hart portrayal was uncomfortably close, supplying a harsh chronicle to her drinking. As the play’s stage directions noted, the youthful Julia of 1925 looked fresh and glowing, but in 1927 she showed signs of decay, and by 1934 she had acquired the typical flabbiness of the steady drinker, a woman never quite sober. Julia Glenn preferred to sleep with men much younger than herself. Unlike George Oppenheimer’s
Here Today
, which borrowed mainly her mannerisms, this was not a likeness Dorothy could laugh off by going backstage and carrying off an awkward moment with a “darling, how delightful.” If she had never been fond of Kaufman, now she hated him.

She was able to avoid
Merrily We Roll Along
. Alan, who felt he had earned a holiday, proposed going to California for a honeymoon after the season ended at Elitch Gardens. They could visit Hollywood and stay with Don and Bea Stewart for a few weeks. In the meantime, another idea came along. They met Rosalie Stewart, a former Broadway producer, now a Hollywood agent, who thought they should go to Hollywood as a husband-and-wife writing team and even promised to get them a ten-week contract at Paramount.

Hearing Rosalie Stewart’s idea and remembering her unpleasant experience at MGM in 1928, Dorothy disdained the plan and wanted to “file the whole thing under Horseshit,” but Alan felt differently. He became increasingly excited, especially when Stewart talked about a deal in which Alan’s contract would call for him to write dialogue as well as act. When Dorothy continued to drag her feet, he pointed out that the job would last only for ten weeks and that she could repay the suffocating mass of debt he called “Dottie’s dowry.”

They signed contracts that guaranteed Alan two hundred and fifty dollars a week and Dorothy one thousand, a discrepancy that seemed reasonable to Alan. His wife was, after all, an acknowledged literary figure, and he knew that without her Paramount would not have signed him at all. The studio’s news release announced that Dorothy’s first assignment would be to write an original screenplay for Lee Tracy and Carole Lombard.

For Dorothy, the film capital was symbolized by a sight she never forgot:

Once I was coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about a block long, and out of the side window was a wonderfully slinky mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled at the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it.

Throughout the thirties, Hollywood was a combination kosher deli and El Dorado that attracted talented writers of all types: newspapermen like Ben Hecht, left-wing New York theater people such as Clifford Odets and John Howard Lawson, a contingent of
New Yorker
authors, even some of the country’s most illustrious novelists and playwrights—William Faulkner, Elmer Rice, Thornton Wilder, and later Scott Fitzgerald. There was no secret about their motivations. Everybody was eager to make the proverbial hay while the sun shone, and few remained immune to the astronomical salaries being offered. What they were obliged to do in order to collect the huge paychecks was another matter.

The emigrés rented bungalows at the Garden of Allah or houses in Beverly Hills. When they gathered at parties, they stood around grumbling about how degrading their jobs were, although Sid Perelman rated screen-writing as “no worse than playing the piano in a house of call.” There was good cause for complaint. Standard procedure assigned half a dozen writers to the same film, either working simultaneously or performing a frontal lobotomy on a predecessor’s script. The relationship between the writer and the studio was more or less sadomasochistic. Writers held their employers in contempt, feelings that were reciprocated. Studio executives called them “schmucks with Underwoods,” or the highest-paid secretaries in the world. Dorothy and Alan prepared for the worst.

The Hollywood press eagerly fed them into its meat grinder and they emerged in the press looking like chopped movie star:

The devastating Dorothy Parker and her young husband, Mr. Campbell, were practically turtle-doves [at the Trocadero] ...

Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell guests at Countess di Frasso’s ...

Met Dorothy Parker with Alan Campbell, her young and handsome husband, at a tea given by Zoe Akins ...

Dorothy Parker and the handsome husband buying a house in her once despised Hollywood. New York papers please copy.

Although Alan appeared satisfied with secondary billing, Dorothy was alert to the potential dangers of a husband living in his wife’s shadow. Paramount made a token attempt to credit him for being somebody in his own right. The caption accompanying a studio publicity photo announced:

Doubly Famous: Alan Campbell, actor-author, just placed under contract by Paramount, is a double bid for fame. Plus his own accomplishments, which are several, he can rightfully brag about those of his talented wife, Dorothy Parker, also under contract to Paramount as a writer.

This was feeble but probably better than nothing. That Paramount failed to enumerate Alan’s several accomplishments was unfortunate, but hardly accidental. Once it became clear to the studio that Dorothy, despite her reputation, was worthless to them without Alan, he was never offered an acting role of any kind.

Those who later claimed that Alan rode on Dorothy’s coattails in Hollywood could not have been more mistaken. He was a capable, but certainly not a distinguished or original writer. He continued to write for
The New Yorker
throughout the thirties, publishing a total of nineteen short stories. In Hollywood, from the start, he showed himself to be a dogged worker determined to master a new craft. His strength turned out to be construction. He would first block out a scene, then labor to pull it together on paper so that Dorothy could follow along and inject amusing dialogue. Without her, Alan’s scenes would have fallen flat, but without him there would have been no scene. As a team they were a perfect complement.

On September 3, they moved into the Paramount writers building, where they were assigned a comfortable, if seedy, office. The Lee Tracy picture did not materialize. She told the Murphys that the work they were given “stinks.” One of their first scripts was
Twenty-two Hours by Air
, a story that had been kicking around the studio so long that the progress of aerial transportation had practically made it obsolete. “It is now called ‘Eleven Hours by Air,’ ” Dorothy said. “By the time we are done, the title is to be, I believe, ‘Stay Where You Are.’ ” (It was finally produced as
One Hour Late. )
They prepared a new screenplay for
Sailor Beware
, an adaptation of a recent Broadway play, and removed the sex from a previous version, specifically a scene in which the sailor bets he can seduce the woman. The producer considered it obscene. “But would they accept our change,” Dorothy reported to Aleck Woollcott, “that triumph of ingenuity where the sailor just bets he will make another sailor? Oh, no. Sometimes I think they don’t know
what
they want.” What they did not want was the Parker-Campbell version, nor did they even want the screenplay’s original title, because it was finally released in 1936 as
Lady Be Careful
. Dorothy and Alan also worked on a Sylvia Sidney picture, Here
Is
My Heart, followed by still another assignment memorable mainly because they were informed of neither plot nor title, only that “the male lead will be played by Tullio Carminati or Bing Crosby. So just write it with both of them in mind.”

Dorothy explained to Harold Guinzburg that a few months in Hollywood would mean “no art but can clear up that national debt.” The Campbells’ combined salary of twelve hundred and fifty dollars a week represented a truly gigantic sum at a time when income taxes were minimal and the dollar worth six or seven times its current value. It was a relief to repay debts. At the same time, they found that living in Hollywood in a manner befitting their position was far more expensive than living in New York. She discovered that “Hollywood money isn’t money.” It was “congealed snow” that “melts in your hand.”

They rented a house at 520 North Canon Drive in Beverly Hills. When they received assurance that their contracts would be renewed, they decided to purchase expensive white carpets, whose impracticality made them irresistible. Christmas came and the weather felt like summer. Dorothy could not have been more delighted with their new home, as she wrote to Woollcott:

Aside from the work which I hate like holy water, I love it here. There are any number of poops about, of course, but so are there in New York—or, as we call it, The Coast—and the weather’s better here. I love having a house, I love its being pretty wherever you look, I love a big yard full of dogs. There are two additions—a four-months-old dachshund, pure enchantment, named Fräulein, and a mixed party called Scrambles who is, by a happy coincidence, the one dog in the world you couldn’t love. This gap in her character causes us to lean over backwards to ply her with attentions, and so she’s worse than ever. You don’t know anybody who wants a half-Welsh-terrier, half-Zambi, do you?

In New York, Dorothy’s pets had been welcomed, or at least tolerated, by public establishments, but she found local custom to be less broadminded. When she brought one of her dogs to the Beverly Hills Hotel, the animal misbehaved in the lobby.

The manager promptly appeared. “Miss Parker, Miss Parker!” he shouted. “Look what your dog did.”

Dorothy drew herself up and gave the man a withering look. “I did it,” she said and walked away with as much dignity as she could summon under the circumstances. After this, she left the dogs home.

Thanks to Alan, life on North Canon Drive was a miracle of orderliness. Not only did he take care of everything, but also he cosseted her with loving patience. There was less drinking, with a few exceptions. After they threw a splashy housewarming party, to which they invited a hundred guests and were surprised to find more than three hundred showed up, Dorothy declared that her hangover was impressive enough to be referred to as “we.” Apart from her comparative sobriety, other changes could be noticed. No more did she talk about killing herself. When this became apparent to Dorothy, she was amazed.

In May my heart was breaking—
Oh, wide the wound, and deep!
And bitter it beat at waking,
And sore it split in sleep.

And when it came November,
I sought my heart, and sighed,
“Poor thing, do you remember?”
“What heart was that?” it cried.

“Autumn Valentine,” published in 1935, was one of her last verses. No longer did she despair over princes who turned into frogs. Having always courted men capable of torturing her, having always derived creative inspiration from her suffering, she now found herself in the paradoxical position of being wed to a man who did not abuse her but who also failed to inspire serious writing. As far as is known, she composed only one poem for him and that was later, during the war, when it was history that caused her misery. In 1931, Viking had published Dorothy’s third volume of poetry under the title
Death and Taxes
, which was followed five years later by a volume of her collected verse, Not So Deep
as a
Well. After 1935, however, Dorothy wrote only three known poems: the unpublished “The Passionate Screen Writer To His Love” (1937), “Threat to a Fickle Lady” (1938), and “War Song” (1944).

At MGM, William Randolph Hearst had built his mistress, actress Marion Davies, a dressing-room bungalow whose entrance was adorned with a statue of the Madonna. To Dorothy’s annoyance, Hollywood insisted upon crediting her with the authorship of a popular jingle about them:

Upon my honor
I saw a Madonna
Standing in a niche
Above the door
Of a prominent whore
Of a prominent son of a bitch.

Dorothy, offended, declared that she would never stoop to rhyming
honor
with
Madonna
.

Despite her happiness with Alan and her abandonment of suicide as a philosophy of life, a few lingering anxieties emerged in the form of psychosomatic ailments. While living in Denver she experienced hay fever for the first time. The allergy made her uncomfortable but proved to be minor compared to the itching and scratching that began once she arrived in California, where she was afflicted with hives. Throughout the fall, the hives worsened. Despite a battery of tests, her doctor could offer no sensible answers about the cause. After Christmas, she developed intestinal hives and was obliged to spend a week at Good Samaritan—“or at least Pretty Good Samaritan”—Hospital. In time the hives passed, as such problems often do.

Dashiell Hammett was a writer for whom she had high regard. While reviewing
The Glass Key
in 1931, she described him “as American as a sawed-off shotgun.” He was one of the most powerful writers of the time and had become her hero. That same year, catching sight of him at a cocktail party, she introduced herself before dropping to her knees and kissing his hand. It was meant to be funny, but Hammett was so embarrassed that, he responded with an uncharacteristic simpering reply. The woman with him stared daggers at Dorothy. Afterward, the dagger-staring woman and Hammett quarreled over what kind of a man would permit a literary critic to kneel in adoration. In the winter of 1935, Dorothy ran into Hammett’s critical girlfriend at a party. After Lillian Hellman spent the better part of the evening glowering at her, they finally began to talk and realized they liked each other. The previous autumn, her play
The Children’s Hour
had opened to acclaim and was named the best play of the year by the New York Drama Critics Circle. Samuel Goldwyn had brought her to Hollywood with a salary of twenty-five hundred dollars a week.