Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (48 page)

Dorothy and Alan, taking action forthwith, moved into a room at the Water Wheel Tavern and prepared to devote the remainder of the summer to buying and restoring Fox House.

In August, a reporter for the
Doylestown Intelligencer
stopped by the bar at the Water Wheel and asked the waitress if any celebrities had checked in. None that she knew of, she replied, but they did have a couple named Campbell, and Mrs. Campbell received mail addressed to Dorothy Parker. When Lester Trauch called to request an interview, Dorothy and Alan invited him to join them for dinner at the inn. Trauch showed up with another reporter, his friend Grace Chandler. Entertaining the local press, Dorothy abstemiously limited herself to one old-fashioned before dinner and a single brandy afterward. Alan turned on his full charm when he learned that Trauch, a theater lover, had enjoyed Alan’s performance in
Design for Living.
He was terribly pleased to find a fan in the Pennsylvania boondocks. Running through Trauch’s mind was what an odd couple the Campbells made. Alan, lithe as a dancer, appeared so much younger than Dorothy that “they might have been mother and son.”

It became clear that buying the farm was going to be a lot more difficult than Dorothy and Alan had expected. Tom and John Ross, the legal firm they had retained to handle the closing, were having trouble with the Lithuanians. Even though they had been given notice to vacate the premises, they seemed strenuously determined to keep the Campbells out. They dramatized their protests by draping across the threshold of the front door the body of a dead groundhog. “It was August weather,” Dorothy remembered, “and the groundhog had not too recently passed on.” The squatters’ delaying tactics angered Alan so greatly that he complained to Jack Boyle, who advised patience and reminded him that the old people had standing crops to harvest and chickens to ready for market.

“That’s
their
problem,” Alan said stubbornly. “Don’t they realize it’s costing Dottie and me seven hundred and fifty dollars a week to stay away from Hollywood?”

Actually, it was costing double that figure but fifteen hundred dollars a week would have been even less comprehensible to the Lithuanians, or to any of the Bucks County farmers for that matter.

After retaining an architect to proceed with the alterations, they decided to stay in the area to keep an eye on the work. Alan was growing restless at the Water Wheel, their room having become cramped because both of them had a habit of piling up books and magazines on the floor. Just as the room was beginning to resemble the basement of a public library and the maid was complaining about the impossibility of cleaning, the owner of the Cuttalossa Inn near Lumberville proposed closing his establishment to the public and renting the entire quarters to the Campbells. It seemed like an ideal solution, but the natives were appalled. “It was the Depression,” said Lester Trauch, “and they must have been paying enough rent so that the Cuttalossa didn’t need any other business. People thought this was insane. We didn’t know exactly how much rent the Campbells were paying, but whatever it was seemed outrageous in our eyes.”

In the middle of September, after an absence of three months, they left Fox House in the hands of a crew of workmen and raced back to the Coast by plane, the first of many such cross-country air trips. They were due to begin work at Selznick International on a picture that would be, they were told, a tragedy. This was unusual. During their two years in the business almost every one of their assignments had been a comedy, hardly surprising, for during the Depression comedies had become Hollywood’s forte. Operating on the theory that people out of work would not pay to see movies about people out of work, studios were usually careful to portray a fantasy world devoid of economic hardship. Even when a serious property was purchased, it somehow wound up on the screen thoroughly fumigated of anything that might kindle a thought or resemble a message. Employed solely for her wit, Dorothy was constantly typecast by producers and accepted the fact that she would probably never be invited to work on serious features. However, this was about to change.

She did not expect much from David Selznick, the dictatorial thirty-four-year-old studio head. One of Hollywood’s self-important young Turks, as recently as 1934 he had been kicking around MGM and RKO before forming his own independent company. His track record was not particularly impressive and he was hoping to recoup some of his losses with a film about Hollywood, a subject he believed the whole world found as fascinating as he did. The trouble with previous pictures on the subject, he decided, was a lack of credibility. Basing his idea for a plot on a 1932 film,
What Price Hollywood?,
he visualized a movie about a determined young woman, a country bumpkin, who turns up in Hollywood to break into pictures and marries a famous movie idol. The twist is that his career begins to nose-dive just as hers is ascending, until eventually the husband, an alcoholic has-been, feels there is no alternative except to swim out to sea toward the sunset. Although Selznick considered himself a gifted screenwriter and certainly the author of this tale, he believed that it would be unwise to give himself the credit for reasons of policy. Robert Carson and William Wellman developed a screenplay, as yet untitled. Selznick signed Dorothy and Alan as a second team to rewrite the script and beef up the final dialogue. In fact, he took no writer’s contribution very seriously.

On her arrival in Hollywood in 1934, Dorothy had made an important discovery. Everybody seemed to believe they were writers. Guards at the studio gates expounded story ideas and messenger boys bearing interoffice memos felt no qualms about suggesting dialogue. The worst offenders in this respect were producers. Evidently, Selznick believed that a film was capable of writing itself. Some years later, he openly discounted the efforts of Dorothy and Alan, as well as Carson and director William Wellman, by insisting that ninety-five percent of the dialogue in A Star Is Born “was actually straight out of life and was straight ‘reportage,’ so to speak.” That autumn he irritated Dorothy with his habit of flapping into her office around six o’clock, just as she and Alan were preparing to go home. They would spring to attention while he rejected their handiwork by beginning, “No, not this,” and then they would be compelled to stay late changing it. Equally irksome were the afternoons when he would march in with a page of dialogue he had composed and fling it on her desk.

The following spring, the Campbells went to see
A Star Is Born
when it opened at Radio City Music Hall. They apparently were pleased with their work because in an interview, Dorothy pointed proudly to the script as an example of the progress Hollywood was making in respect to realism. She said happily that producers were discovering “that people, once given the chance, would be as partial to good pictures as they once were to bad ones.”

Upon reflection, she felt that she had contributed nothing of significance to Selznick’s Technicolor opus, which may account for her subsequent negativity when she expressed surprise that anyone considered
A Star Is Born
a memorable picture. She also liked to pretend that she had never seen the entire film: “I went to see it, all alone, for a few minutes, and I came out, all alone.” Dorothy and Alan, with Robert Carson, were nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay, but they failed to win (the award went to the writers of
The Life of Emile Zola).
Carson and Wellman picked up the film’s only Oscar for Best Original Story. At the Oscar presentations, Wellman accepted the award and then rendered homage by marching it straight over to Selznick: “Take it, you had more to do with winning it than I did.”

All the while, Dorothy and Alan, busy nesting, had their minds elsewhere. Rebuilding the farmhouse was exciting, and they devoted so many hours to studying blueprints that Alan later used them to paper a wall in the upstairs hall. They spent a great deal of time toying with color schemes, leafing transfixed through endless catalogues full of furniture, hardware, and Early American accessories. They intended the completed Fox House to be a dream.

Another dream also seemed to be coming true that autumn. At the age of forty-three, Dorothy found herself pregnant. It looked as if a totally new phase of her life was about to begin. Over the years she had expressed her longing to “have babies,” as she put it. She and Alan were jubilant and regarded her conception as a miracle, but anxiety about her chances for carrying a baby to term made them cautious about announcing the news. Privately, she talked about little else and began to knit baby clothes.

Once she passed the first trimester in December and revealed her pregnancy to friends, she developed a baby mania. She was soon beleaguered with requests for interviews and photographs. In response to a query from Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons, she and Alan wired: HOW DID YOU KNOW BEFORE WE DID? DOCTOR SAID SOMETIME IN JUNE. Some of her friends regarded this publicity as inappropriate. Frances Goodrich had known Dorothy in New York before she and husband Albert Hackett arrived at MGM to write the
Thin Man
films. Goodrich found Dorothy’s behavior pathetic:

When she knew she was pregnant, she called up Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons to give them the scoop. In God’s name! Dottie Parker announcing she’s going to have a baby when she’s forty-five or something, nature’s last attempt. And knitting for the cameras!

Despite the love Dorothy routinely lavished on her dogs, few people could imagine her as a mother. “She was great with dogs,” said a friend. “A dog couldn’t talk back and couldn’t top her jokes. But I thought she would grow very bored with motherhood. She didn’t have the staying power.” Another skeptic questioned whether it was possible for her “to have anything in common with children because they didn’t drink.” There were jocose predictions that the baby, accustomed to imbibing in utero a liquid diet of martinis and French brandy, would emerge tight and need a cup of coffee. Nobody doubted that Alan would make an exceptional father because his rapport with children was plain to see. Thomas Guinzburg has vivid recollections from his childhood of the Campbells’ visiting his parents. He remembers Alan’s extraordinary ease with himself and his sister, his sense of fun and mischief, and how ready he was for a romp. “He would be with us in the kitchen, shooting with a water pistol and spraying the cook, and I thought I’d get blamed.” Dorothy remained in the drawing room.

“Oh my,” Guinzburg once overhead her say, “if only the Guinzburg children were as well behaved as the Guinzburg dogs.”

They flew to New York for the Christmas holidays. Even though no sign whatever of trouble had arisen thus far, sometime during the week between Christmas and New Year she miscarried. Her physical recovery was fairly rapid, because less than two weeks later she attended a birthday tea at Adele Lovett’s home, where she partied with Marc Connelly, John O’Hara, and Averell Harriman. Dick Myers wrote to his wife Alice Lee that she was “looking well after her mishap.” She managed to contain her feelings, deliberately minimizing the seriousness of the loss to her friends. During her New York stay, the Murphys were in Saranac Lake, New York, where Patrick had taken a turn for the worse. He died at the end of January, after an eight-year battle with tuberculosis.

When faced with loss in the past, her typical response had been an attempt at self-destruction or a major depression, followed by efforts to survive by literary description. Now the situation was different. She had grown immeasurably stronger during her marriage. She had felt no suicidal impulses for several years—and Alan was there to offer comfort. Following the standard advice given in the case of failed pregnancies, she did her best to forget the incident as quickly as possible by getting pregnant again. After returning to California, she began infertility tests. During that winter, mourning one pregnancy and trying to achieve another, she worked on a second Selznick comedy,
Nothing Sacred
, and did her best to produce amusing dialogue.

By spring, Fox House was finally ready for occupancy. A new cellar, a well, and electricity had been installed. They did not have a telephone because the phone company was asking three thousand dollars to bring in the lines to Pipersville, charges Dorothy and Alan considered prohibitive. They decided it would be refreshing to live “sweet and peaceful and sequestered.” The task of transforming the place into a home was left to Alan, but Dorothy agreed with his plan to pass up safe neutral tints in favor of a variety of styles and colors. The result was an unusual mixture of Colonial, Empire, and Victorian, with a few advanced touches such as indirect lighting, a style local wits derided as Pipersville Modern. Alan’s efforts delighted her but were judged to be in impossibly bad taste by some of their friends, who were swift to voice their opinions. Dorothy later excused his excesses by claiming that the interior design was a deliberate protest against the theory that present-day country dwellers ought to live like Early Americans.

The house looked extremely cheerful and felt comfortable. The living room contained ten shades of red, including shrimp walls, Chinese red carpeting, and a wing chair upholstered in pink chintz with a large floral pattern. It was like sitting in the middle of a bowl of cherry Jell-O, but Dorothy admired the room and decided that the rosy tones made her look younger. The master bedroom was painted deep marine blue, a spacious dressing room was built, and space made for three dog beds so that a few of their nine animals could always sleep with them. Alan’s piece de résisance was lining the deeply recessed windows in the dining room with sheets of mirror to reflect the orchard beyond. Dorothy loved the idea but visitors rolled up their eyes at each other. They believed that Alan had ruined the old windows.

Having decorated the interior without making concessions to Bucks County custom, the Campbells next set to work landscaping the grounds. Near the house stood a grove of trees, “a clump of sickly, straggly maples” as Dorothy described them, that blocked her view of the meadows. With little thought to the matter, she and Alan had the trees chopped down. When word of this desecration circulated among their writing friends, everyone expressed horror. Fifty years later, the cutting of the trees still had not been forgotten. Writer Joseph Schrank observed, “They weren’t content to citify the house, but then they started cutting down trees. It was terrible. Dottie didn’t give a damn, but the writers out there were incensed, and I remember how one playwright swore he was going to write a play about it.”