Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (59 page)

Only after Dorothy’s fury against Alan began to flow did her depression slowly depart. She had two and a half years to come to terms with his bombshell, because he took his time returning after the war. Although he told her he planned to divorce and remarry, some of his friends wondered if he seriously meant it. They knew that he and his woman friend were fond of each other, got on extremely well, and shared a number of tastes, including an interest in furniture and decoration, but they doubted that the affair would result in marriage. Josh Logan interpreted it as a threat to remind Dorothy how much she needed him. “Alan expected her to plead with him to come home.” Before the war, he had a great need to punish her, and his English romance was a ready-made way to achieve this end.

For a time, Dorothy’s biggest fear was that the Englishwoman would want to marry Alan. When she decided she never wanted to see him again, she feared that the woman would not. That Alan might fall in love with another woman had not seriously occurred to her. Marriage to him had entailed a number of indignities, including the sly smiles of those who had ridiculed her for marrying a chorus boy. She had been responsible for placing him in a false light and telling people he was gay. She had built the myth of his homosexuality so carefully that she herself had nearly come to believe it. Even in the late fifties, she blithely remarked to Charles Addams, “I can compete with the girls, but not the boys.” The Englishwoman was no boy.

By the fall of 1946, for reasons never clear to her, Alan’s affair seemed to be wearing thin; suddenly he wrote that he was coming home. Dorothy did not answer. In desperation, he contacted Toni Strassman, asking her to act as intermediary, to reassure Dottie that he would be back soon. Dorothy’s pride would not permit her to forgive him or to take him back. She decided it was time he earned his own living. She intended to divorce him.

Alan returned to New York on November 13. The following spring, he was in Las Vegas. In this rite of passage, both he and Dorothy charged mental cruelty. Despite his residence in Nevada, Alan insisted that he did not want a divorce, which no doubt was the truth. It was the war that had made them strangers and destroyed their marriage, he believed. “I’m sorry it’s over,” he told newspaper reporters. “We had a wonderful time.” He assured his family that Dottie was still the love of his life. To his uncle he said: “I can’t live without her and I can’t live with her. Now what am I going to do about it, Roy?” Roy Eichel, a bachelor, could offer no advice.

The farm was put up for sale. Furnishings were divided, although there was little Dorothy wished to keep except the Utrillo and a Picasso gouache. The rest was either stored at Horte’s house in Point Pleasant or moved into the city to furnish Alan’s new duplex on East Sixty-second Street. Some of his decorating could not be removed—for example, the blueprint wallpaper in the upstairs hallway, labeled “A Country Residence for Mr. and Mrs. Alan Campbell,” which finally began to buckle in the 1980s and had to be removed by the farm’s present owner. The mirrors lining the dining room windows remained and the statue of Bacchus continued to stand sentinel in the garden.

Both Dorothy and Alan handled the divorce quite well. Throughout the unpleasant task of dismantling their marriage, they maintained cordial relations. Dorothy finally stopped referring to Alan as “a shit and a queer.” Although they seldom saw each other, the Christmas after the divorce they spent a rare evening together at the theater and went to the Stork Club afterward. The name of the play was appropriate:
Crime and Punishment.

Chapter 16

TOAD TIME

1948-1955

Tall with dark eyes and hair, Rosser Lynn Evans was thirty-one years old. Alan had been responsible for introducing him to Dorothy in Miami Beach, where Evans had been in Officer Candidate School with Alan and Josh Logan. In 1942, she had paid Evans no attention, except to notice that he was a two-fisted drinker who always seemed to be drunker than she was. According to Logan, Evans not only seemed to be drunker, he was. “He was a confirmed alcoholic who would just go silly with liquor. Once we got him through a mapmaking examination by cheating for him. It was an awful thing to do to the United States Air Force but he was a nice guy and we liked him.”

After the war, Evans was working in New York as a radio announcer when Dorothy encountered him at a party. His confession that he aspired to writing a novel caught her interest. She told him that she hoped to write an historical play about Mary and Charles Lamb but hadn’t yet found a collaborator. Was he interested? This was her all-purpose cocktail party conversational gambit, but it was fresh to Evans. Unable to distinguish Lambs from lamb chops, he tried to hide his ignorance. Later he described himself as “dazed. Me collaborate? I’d have been glad just to sharpen her pencils.”

Dorothy had no need of a pencil sharpener or an alcoholic radio announcer with a secret passion to write. At the same time, she could not deny that big, good-looking, available men were rare.

There were quite a few raised eyebrows among Dorothy’s friends, who thought he was handsome—“a beautiful hunk of Victor Mature” said Bea Stewart—but not overly bright. Since he continued to wear his air-force shoes, they tagged him Li’l Abner, but the shoes had little to do with the nickname. Compared with Alan, Josh Logan said, “Ross Evans lacked talent, flair, and strength. Leaning against him must have been like leaning on a tower of Jell-0.” Yet Dorothy needed to touch him. “She was constantly pawing him, couldn’t keep her hands off him,” another friend noticed.

Ross Evans, after graduating from Tenafly (New Jersey) High School, had worked as a messenger in the garment district before winning a swimming scholarship to Franklin and Marshall College, where he majored in English. He had married before the war but was now divorced. Unlike Alan, he had no interest in domesticity and thought of himself as an athlete, having once been diving champion at the Newark Athletic Club. He still had a muscular body, but liquor was beginning to take its toll.

Since Ross was an agreeable drinking companion, Dorothy felt comfortable with him. He was soon living with her at the New Weston. She thought him splendidly masculine, well built, and sexy and looked forward to a refurbished sex life. At the outset, like a false springtime, there was a brief flurry of activity. Then weeks and sometimes months would pass without Evans’s exhibiting the slightest interest in sex, a not-unusual pattern with heavy drinkers. She took pleasure in publicly punishing him by announcing to a room full of guests at a party that “Rossie” would not sleep with her. She may not have been as troubled as she claimed. Late at night, engulfed in the pleasant fumes of Courvoisier, often falling into bed and passing out, she could not be bothered with sex either. When Evans did happen to be seized by an amorous urge, he sometimes acted on it forthwith, regardless of time and place. Once, while visiting friends, he began making love to Dorothy on their living room sofa. Dorothy thought it was funny, but apologized afterward to her red-faced hosts.

Since Evans had an urgent need to see his name in lights, he kept pressuring her to work so that he might accumulate a few joint bylines. Dorothy was in no hurry to oblige. When Cosmopolitan magazine sent around a scout to see if she could be talked into writing a story, she invited Aaron Hotchner up for a drink, even though writing fiction for Cosmopolitan was hardly something she had been longing to do. Ross, definitely a participant in the negotiations, swaggered around making highballs, attempted to speak for both of them, and frequently used the pronoun we. There was no doubt that he was eager to accept the Cosmo proposition.

Meanwhile, sophisticated in the ways of publishers demanding her blood, Dorothy was playing hard to get. She said that her writing joints had probably atrophied from disuse. As she began her third highball, she expressed doubt whether she could get back to the typewriter, it had been so long.

“Don’t worry about that,” Evans piped up.
“I’ll
handle the typewriter.” The way he loomed over her, legs bent and chin thrust out, reminded Hotchner of a paratrooper standing at parade rest.

Evans was absent the next time Hotchner came by to discuss his proposal. When he suggested having lunch downstairs in the dining room, Dorothy hesitated and explained that she was six months behind in her rent. She didn’t dare leave her room for fear of running into the manager. Hotchner, feeling sorry for her, promised protection and assurances that the lobby at noontime would no doubt be crowded. As they cruised by the reception desk, however, a voice called out, “Mrs. Parker! May we see you a moment?”

Out bustled a receptionist who delivered a stack of uncollected mail, among which there turned out to be a check.

In the dining room, the captain came to the table for their order four times. Dorothy downed three highballs before being forced to select a lunch that she did not eat. She asked Hotchner if Cosmopolitan would accept a dual byline and described Evans as a person who kept her from drinking while she worked. The story she outlined to Hotchner was about a newly married couple, recently returned from their honeymoon, who were hosting a dinner party for his friends. Throughout the evening, which would include an elaborate dinner followed by parlor games, one of the guests (a former mistress of the man’s) lengthily reveals to the wife that her husband’s first wife had killed herself. Hotchner, who was being paid a three-hundred-dollar bonus for each famous author he bagged, didn’t much care what the story was about so long as Dorothy delivered a publishable manuscript.

If Dorothy had never before collaborated on a short story, neither had Evans ever written one. He proved to be a mediocre writer. Refusing to listen to her voice of experience, he plunged ahead like a maddened race-horse, with a predictable result. When “The Game” was finally pronounced finished by Evans, she felt like a Lhasa Apso who had just given birth to a Saint Bernard. She watched the great creature stagger to its feet and lumber off into the pages of the December 1948 Cosmopolitan. Except for perhaps the first few paragraphs, there was nothing about “The Game” that suggested its coauthor was Dorothy Parker.

She had been pulling Hotchner’s leg with her tale of atrophied writing joints. The truth was, she had not been as idle as she pretended. The previous year she and Frank Cavett had concocted a film treatment about an alcoholic wife. John Howard Lawson had subsequently based a screenplay on the treatment for Universal.
Smash-Up:
The Story of
a
Woman was a female version of
The Lost Weekend
with Susan Hayward effectively playing the Ray Milland role. It won Dorothy and Cavett an Academy Award nomination in 1947 for best original story and Hayward a best actress nomination. Hollywood gossip said that the film was based on the life of Bing Crosby’s wife Dixie Lee, an impression that Dorothy did nothing to correct. Although
Smash-Up
lost the best story Oscar to Miracle on
Thirty-fourth
Street, it garnered exceptionally good reviews and served as an announcement in the picture business that Dorothy could still turn out quality work, with or without the slave-driving Alan Campbell.

Throughout their screen-writing career, Dorothy and Alan had been represented by various Hollywood superagents like Leland Hayward and Zeppo Marx. In early 1948, mobilizing herself for action, Dorothy retained another top agent, Irving “Swifty” Lazar, to negotiate a contract for her at Twentieth Century-Fox. When she packed up and headed for the Coast, Ross Evans followed closely on her heels.

Chateau Marmont is a bogus turreted castle on Sunset Boulevard, a bit seedy in appearance, but in 1947 even the Garden of Allah had begun to look arthritic. Dorothy settled snugly into California hotel life and spent the winter working on her play about the mad Mary Lamb. Recreating Charles and Mary Lamb and their friends, a collection of manic-depressive Bohemians that included Coleridge and a hopped-up De Quincey, was thoroughly enjoyable. All her characters had comforting habits—opium, laudanum, brandy, homicide—that she understood and respected. With a title inspired by the mythical shore where Shakespeare shipwrecked Viola and Sebastian
in Twelfth Night, The Coast of Illyria
was based on the tormented life of Mary Lamb, who had fatally wounded her mother by planting a kitchen knife in her chest during a psychotic episode, and on Mary’s brother, Charles. Despite a sprinkling of humorous lines (Wordsworth is described as being “up to his rump in sunsets”), the play drew mainly on Dorothy’s painful psychological relationship with Alan. On top of this personal memoir, she superimposed the lives of the early nineteenth-century siblings—a brother and sister who needed each other too desperately to ever separate, drifting toward destruction as the woman’s recurrent attacks of insanity push the man further into alcoholism, attacks that in the end assure her total derangement.