Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (62 page)

Her ménage à trois with Agee and the Pink Worm caused the squeamish to blanch. A disgusted Sid Perelman described them as living like pigs “in a fog of crapulous laundry, stale cigarette smoke, and dirty dishes, sans furniture or cleanliness; one suspects they wet their beds.” The group broke up at the end of October when Agee was stricken with a second heart attack. Once he had been released from the hospital, his wife, Mia, arrived to take charge of him. Dorothy, alone and lonely in the empty rooms, her toleration for disorder apparently having reached its limit, moved herself and Misty to a tidy room at the Chateau Marmont.

By September 1952, she was back in New York and feeling so grateful to be home that “I get up every morning and want to kiss the pavement.” She leased an apartment in a residence hotel on East Seventy-fourth Street, just off Central Park. The Volney was a small, well-kept, moderately expensive hotel popular with the literary and theater crowd. Dorothy knew a number of people who had once lived there, including journalist Quentin Reynolds, who still did. It was idyllic for Misty, since there were more than forty dogs in the building. All she wanted to do now was to write a successful play and be able to “eat and live and have a roof—and buy some dresses.” Soon after her arrival she wasted no time in beginning a play featuring characters who live in a hotel that closely resembles the Volney.

In California, while working on a picture about Eva Tanguay called The I Don’t Care Girl, she had met Arnaud d‘Usseau. At thirty-six, d’Usseau was a successful playwright who had a fine record as a co-writer on the Broadway stage. During the war, collaborating with James Gow, he had taken part in several commercial hits including
Tomorrow the World
and
Deep Are the Roots
. In 1951, after Gow died, d’Usseau tried to write a play alone but was never able to get it produced. Like Dorothy, he did best as a team writer. When they met, it was a case of two professionals in search of a collaborator. Dorothy also felt personally attracted to the hard-working, moody, bespectacled writer, a well-known radical whose views were compatible with her own.

Their original idea, a murder mystery, was soon discarded. “We dropped it when we found we liked the murderers too much,” Dorothy joked. Instead, they began talking about a social phenomenon particularly noticeable in New York but certainly not exclusive to it. “We had been thinking of the numbers of small expensive hotels, lived in by lone ladies. And there we were.” Like the Volney, these apartment hotels were located in the side streets of the Upper East Side, streets so desirable that they actually had trees planted on them. Exclusive and expensive, they proudly advertised their addresses by claiming that everything interesting in Manhattan lay within convenient distance, a ridiculous boast in Dorothy’s opinion because she doubted very much that the women who lived in these hotels ever went anywhere interesting. Mostly they were widows who, in Dorothy’s words, “are not young. But they take excellent care of themselves, and may look forward to twenty good years, which will be spent ... doing what they are doing in the present, which is nothing at all.”

Admittedly these idle, elderly, lavender-coiffed widows sounded dreary. How many people would want to watch three acts about their barren lives? But what if a woman younger than the rest should happen to be washed ashore, someone who is aware of time slipping by and who looks around and sees in her sister guests some unhappy prophecies of her own future, someone like herself? It was interesting to imagine the complications that such a catalyst might provoke.

There is no question that Dorothy liked the Volney, despite her fierce criticism of it during the next fifteen years. It was exactly to her taste, the kind of surroundings that felt as familiar as a mother’s womb. A green canopied entrance led to a dark, oak-paneled lounge where residents congregated for free tea, gossip, and sour examinations of visitors. Behind the front desk, a switchboard operator smoked and read movie magazines. At the end of the lobby was a dining room where a round table displaying fruit and pastries that seemed to be made of wax sat in the doorway. Dorothy, who always used room service for meals, seldom ate there. She paid $275 (a hefty price in 1952) for a two-room apartment that included a good-sized living room, bedroom, and pantry with a small refrigerator and a hot plate. There were other advantages as well. The management offered maid and laundry service and doormen to walk dogs and assist tipsy residents out of cabs. Once a year, the hotel redecorated and replaced the furniture and rugs that Misty had urinated upon or chewed up.

Not only did she find the Volney comfortable, but also she derived perverse pleasure from its aging clientele, who provided a butt for her ghoulish humor. It seemed as if everywhere she looked her eyes fell upon dried-up females who appeared on the brink of death. She began to wonder how the hotel would get her out should she happen to die. Obviously not by the tiny passenger elevator, which could not accommodate a coffin unless it was stood on end, an undignified position in her opinion, and she certainly would not wish to be carted away in the service elevator with the trash. Finally she came up with a solution that she confided to Quentin Reynolds, who was living on the sixth floor. They must persuade the Volney to build a chute leading from one of its upper floors to the Frank Campbell Funeral Home, a well-known mortuary located a few blocks away. “We’d arrive in good condition and the trip would take a minute,” Dorothy said.

Dorothy and Arnaud d‘Usseau spent the fall at the Volney writing The Ladies of the Corridor, whose title came from T. S. Eliot’s “Sweeney Erect.” To avoid problems, d’Usseau’s wife, Susan, established strict rules for dealing with Dorothy’s drinking. The d’Usseaus began to function as a package replacement for Alan, with Arnaud as writing partner and Susan assuming responsibility for maintenance of sobriety and management of daily affairs.

Susan was a textile designer and portrait painter. Some years before, she had operated the Book of the Day shop in Hollywood, a bookstore and art gallery that the House Un-American Activities Committee described as a Communist Party front business. Not a great beauty in her physical features, she was vivacious and good humored, an exceptional cook and hostess who knew how to make guests feel comfortable. She was fifteen years older than her husband, whom she married when he was in his early twenties. As a friend described the couple, “She educated him to be a cosmopolitan who knew what to order in restaurants and what wine went with what. Before that he had been a little boy wet behind the ears.” When Arnaud presented his new collaborator, Susan promptly took Dorothy in hand and decided she must be kept off the bottle. Using a system of rewards and bribes, she decreed there would be no drinking during working hours. After work, Arnaud brought Dorothy and Misty back to the house the d’Usseaus owned on East Fifty-eighth Street, where Susan had a home-cooked meal waiting. She fixed Dorothy a drink, allotting time enough for only one before serving the meal at the unusually early hour of six-thirty. After dinner there was entertainment in the form of guests, who had been invited to spend the evening playing charades, adverbs, Botticelli, all the parlor games that Dorothy adored. Susan, in the meantime, unobtrusively monitored Dorothy’s liquor intake so that she would be pleasantly high but not so drunk that she could not work the next day.

Through the d’Usseaus, Dorothy met actor-painter Zero Mostel and his wife, Kate, both of whom she liked immediately and henceforth counted among her closest friends. Zero disliked games, but found that playing with Dorothy was amusing enough to make an exception. One night they were playing Botticelli, the game of identities in which a player thinks of a famous person, Hamlet for example, and tells the other players the initial. They have to ask questions like “Did you write music to be played on water?” and the player who is “it” has to reply, “No, I’m not Handel.” When it was Dorothy’s turn to ask a question, she said, “Do you chase men for business and pleasure?”—a question that stumped the it-player so thoroughly that he had to give up. “J. Edgar Hoover,” Dorothy said. Her answer found an appreciative audience in Mostel who suffered from blacklisting and the grilling of congressional committees. An adoring Kate Mostel thought of Dorothy as “a little flower who wasn’t like the rest of us. She was a fragile, ladylike lady who had to be protected. Somebody would always do her taxes, always escort her home in a taxi, always pick up the tab in a restaurant.”

Dorothy found it vulgar for a woman even to acknowledge the presence of a check on a restaurant table. When invited to friends’ homes, she was content to do nothing after dinner but smoke in the parlor while waiting for after-dinner drinks to be served. Whenever she visited the Mostels, she trotted around the table before dinner and folded up the napkins into animal shapes and afterward offered to help Kate clean up. She took a single plate and polished it until Kate removed it from her hands. The Mostels, aware of her reputation for lethality, waited to be bit but found her toothless.

Kate and Zero Mostel spoiled her. Zero’s brother Milton became her accountant, a hair-raising task because she kept no records and all checks were made out to liquor stores or cash. Susan d’Usseau ran errands and bought her clothes, even underwear. As a result, Dorothy was looking uncharacteristically fashionable. One reason for the rather odd clothing she normally wore was that she disliked shopping, but a more serious problem was her figure, which had begun to develop a notable alcoholic tire around the middle and made her feel self-conscious. To Norman Mailer, her clothing looked as if it had come from attics, except that Los Angeles was a city without attics, and so he never could figure out where she acquired her “congeries of black shawls and garments that gave her the appearance of a British witch.” The loose, baggy garments did little for her appearance, but they were comfortable.

Susan d‘Usseau was, Dorothy discovered, a rigid taskmaster, but more often than not she succeeded in keeping her sober. Dorothy did not mind being bossed around, at least not during the week, because she enjoyed Susan’s personal services—and she did not even have to be married to get them. She showed her appreciation by thanking her profusely and sending her a case of champagne one New Year’s. Weekends and holidays were mercifully exempt from the regimen. On Thanksgiving Day, invited to the Mostels for dinner, she showed up late with the excuse that she had seen a lost kitten huddled under a car. “That was really the drunkest I ever saw her,” said Kate Mostel. “She had a crying jag and all evening talked about the kitten who had no home.” The other guests decided she must have an exceptional passion for cats. Another evening at the Mostels, writer Ian Hunter threatened to kill his family cat. Angry because the animal had urinated in his favorite chair again, he asked for suggestions on the best way to dispose of it. “I expected Dottie to get hysterical,” Kate Mostel said. “Instead she said to Ian, ‘Have you tried kindness?’ ”

By the time The Ladies of the Corridor was completed at the end of the year, Dorothy had begun thinking of it as a feminist play that warned women “to stop sitting around and saying ‘It’s a man’s world.’ ” Although the wasted lives of her characters disturbed her, she was inclined to believe that their illness was rooted not so much in age as in manlessness “and they should be better trained, adjusted to live a life without a man,” a problem that she herself had yet to resolve. It is difficult to determine d’Usseau’s contribution to the story since this was a drama about being Dorothy Parker at fifty-nine, living in a hotel without a man, feeling terrified, and wondering what “fresh hell” lay in wait for her. All the characters seemed to be taken from her life: Eleanor Rothschild, Alan, Horte, but mostly various aspects of herself as an alcoholic, would-be suicide, middle-aged woman seeking affection from a younger man, and as the crone she feared becoming.

Producer Walter Fried planned a first-class production for the following fall. Harold Clurman staged it with an all-star cast. In the leading roles were Edna Best, Betty Field, and Shepperd Strudwick, and an excellent supporting cast included Frances Starr, June Walker, Vera Allen, Margaret Barker, and Walter Matthau. These were exciting months for Dorothy who attended all the rehearsals. Walter Matthau remembered her as “very quiet and quite shy.”

Harold Clurman found her presence unpleasant. “The first day of rehearsal, when we actually put the play on the stage and it was working out very nicely, she began to cry because there it was coming to life.” He labeled her “a bleeding-heart” liberal who was “seldom far from hysteria.” They clashed because she refused to give him credit for knowing anything about audiences. He assured her the play would be a hit if she agreed to cut the Betty Field—character’s suicide and give the work a happy ending. Dorothy wouldn’t hear of it. Making the alcoholic character suffer pleased her, and furthermore, she despised happy endings.

The Ladies of the Corridor had its premiere on October 21, 1953. Dorothy thought it would be “insane” to attend the opening, but, of course, she did. The minute the curtain lowered she crept out and accompanied the d‘Usseaus and the Mostels to the home of friends for a celebration and to wait for the reviews, “and then some bastard said, ‘Let’s go out and get the papers.’ ” Some of the reviews turned out to be disappointing, “not rotten, but not good,” remembered Kate Mostel, who played a small part as a chambermaid. They all did their best to comfort Dorothy, calling critic Brooks Atkinson a jerk who couldn’t distinguish “shit from Shinola,” but the negative comments hurt because, she said, “that play was the only thing I have ever done in which I had great pride.” As she was pulling on her coat to leave, she whispered, “Does anybody need a lady pool shark?”

The Ladies of the Corridor
turned out to be a near-miss. Even though
The New York Times
critic thought everyone knew old women lead pathetic lives without having to go to the theater for a reminder, still five of the eight New York reviewers admired the play. It especially impressed George Jean Nathan, who voted it the best American play of the season in the Drama Critics Circle balloting. It was, he thought, “completely honest.” It also closed after six weeks.