Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (67 page)

A few years earlier, Alan had invested in property, an inexpensive bungalow in West Los Angeles he was planning to remodel and sell. When he assumed that Dorothy would live with him, she indignantly objected. It was hardly suitable for them to stay together after having been as good as divorced for ten years. She had grown accustomed to privacy. At the last minute, she relented—renting a hotel room would be foolish, she decided— but she continued to grumble lest he take her for granted. “I’m a hobo and mean to be forever.” To prove she felt strongly about her single life in New York, she kept her apartment and did not even notify the Volney that she planned to be out of town. She wrote that the two things she most hated were living in suburbia and “the tedium of marriage.” Moving in with Alan seemed to encompass both.

Norma Place was a block-long street in West Hollywood, named years earlier for silent-screen star Norma Talmadge, whose dressing room and servants’ quarters were located there. The two-story frame building that she once had owned was now divided into handsome apartments occupied by Tuesday Weld, Estelle Winwood, and John Carlyle, among others. The rest of the street was lined with modest homes that originally had been constructed as low-income housing for streetcar workers. Alan had purchased one of these. His was a one-story, white stucco bungalow with combined living and dining room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms. It had a small front yard, a backyard, and a narrow cement walk leading up to an elaborately carved double door.

Norma Place was a sociable street. Residents visited their neighbors’ homes for cocktails, ritually walked their dogs together, and cried on each other’s shoulders in times of sorrow. They also were dedicated news gatherers and gossips who seemed never to have heard of minding their own business. Dorothy christened the street Peyton Place West, but more commonly it was called Swish Alps and Boys Town, because the street as well as the entire neighborhood were heavily homosexual.

Glamorous people abounded on Norma Place. Dorothy Dandridge and Carleton Carpenter owned homes. Nina Foch lived around the corner on Lloyd Place. Judy Garland frequently came to visit friends, and Oscar Levant and Hedy Lamarr attended parties. Still, Dorothy’s coming, a major event, immediately established her as the street’s foremost celebrity. As soon as her taxi stopped in front of Number 8983, it was obvious to her that Alan had misled his neighbors into interpreting her arrival as a romantic homecoming. As well-wishers came to the door, she found herself swept up in a sentimental greeting reminiscent of an Andy Hardy movie. After they departed, Dorothy felt fatigued and testy. Giving vent to her feeling that Alan had greatly overdone the occasion, she declared her loathing for the smell of flowers and pitched the welcoming bouquets of daisies and roses into the garbage can.

On the third of April, they began twelve consecutive weeks of employment that was followed by sporadic work, which lasted until Thanksgiving. For Dorothy, these were cheerful months, a period marked by comparative sobriety and surprisingly good relations with Alan, both at home and on the job. They found congenial company in Wyatt Cooper, who was now working as a writer at Fox and who lived a few doors down the street in Carleton Carpenter’s converted garage apartment. Later, Alan splurged on a new car, a flashy dark-green Jaguar that he called his movie-star car, but at the time he and Dorothy hitched rides to work with Cooper. The young Mississippian, whom Dorothy nicknamed “the Sharecropper,” exhibited a determined eagerness to please. His conduct was interpreted by other Norma Place residents as social climbing, but Dorothy considered him amusing and likeable. She also found his willingness to dance attendance on her and Alan useful, because his presence tended to create a buffer between them.

At the studio, the three of them soon fell into the habit of meeting at noon and taking long lunch breaks in which they drove toward Santa Monica seeking interesting places to eat. They giggled about the secretary the studio had assigned to Dorothy and Alan, a woman far too solemn for their taste, and promised each other sleds for Christmas if they could make her laugh. Before long, the sourpuss secretary had been transformed into a running joke. Eavesdropping on her personal phone conversations, they could hardly wait to report them to Cooper when they met at lunchtime. Dorothy enjoyed loitering in the women’s room, where she picked up the latest studio dirt by listening to the secretaries gossip. All of this provided fresh fodder for a merriment that seems reminiscent of her happiness at Vanity Fair when she worked with Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood.

On one of their lunch hours, they were browsing through a Santa Monica antique shop, a junky sort of place in Alan’s eyes, when Dorothy spotted a set of Napoleon and his marshals, thirteen painted porcelain figurines. For reasons mysterious even to her, she found Napoleon enthralling and had begun reading everything she could find about his life. She insisted on buying the set. At home she arranged it on top of a living room bookcase and asked Alan to install a special light overhead.

All through the summer and fall of 1961 their mood continued to be gay. Having again taken over Dorothy’s correspondence, Alan cheerily wrote to Sara and Gerald Murphy that they were planning a trip to New York and would be thrilled to see them. “If by any chance you come out to Carmel, let us know and we will race up.” Alan wanted to believe he had rolled back the clock to 1936, when it had been possible to go larking from one amusing social engagement to another with himself as Dorothy’s manager. He was counting on the box-office success of The Good
Soup
—not an unreasonable expectation for a Marilyn Monroe picture—and other assignments surely following.

During the fall, Dorothy was forced to decide whether or not she would stay in California. At first, she had been careful to mail her rent to the Volney each month. By August, feeling increasingly ambivalent, she was neglecting the rent. This lapse brought a polite note from the manager along with a reminder that her lease was due to expire at the end of September and that a renewal on 9E would mean a rent increase to $450 a month. Dorothy procrastinated. The Volney sent a telegram to notify her that if she failed to renew the hotel would be forced to charge her a monthly rate of $600. Hearing this, but still wondering about the wisdom of burning her bridges, she gave up the apartment. Life was proving sweet lately.

Wyatt Cooper noticed the immense pleasure she and Alan found in each other’s company and sensed that this was how it must have been in earlier years. He was delighted to discover that this Dorothy, in marked contrast to the Dorothy he had first met at the Volney with Alan, had a mind as quick and young as a girl’s. Seldom was he aware of the difference between their ages.

When Cooper’s assignment at Fox ended, he applied for unemployment compensation. This was a natural step for a writer who found himself out of work, but it was not one that occurred naturally to Dorothy and Alan, who resisted his suggestions that they should apply too. No doubt they considered it demeaning, but they also expected more film work to be forthcoming at any moment. Neither was convinced that they were entitled to such payments, particularly in Dorothy’s case, because she received a regular income from Esquire as well as royalties from Viking. In the end, Cooper broke down their reluctance. By his calculations, it would mean seventy-five tax-free dollars a week for each of them, which added up to the considerable sum of about six hundred dollars a month.

Their applications were approved, and soon they appeared every week to sign cards claiming their availability for work. Seeing the parking lot full of Rolls-Royces and sporty Cadillacs, Dorothy decided that just as many celebrities could be found at the unemployment office as at Romanoff’s and, she said, “it’s a much nicer set.” Some months later, when signing for the checks had become a part of their regular weekly routine, they realized that The Good Soup did not represent a comeback, in spite of their high hopes. Afterward, Dorothy said in disgust that they had written “a nice, little, innocent bawdy French farce” for Marilyn Monroe, but that Hollywood remained as always, a place where “everybody’s a writer and has ideas.” Fox, she said, no doubt with exaggeration, “took our script and hoked it up with dope pushers, two murders and, straight out of Fanny Hurst, the harlot with the heart of goo.”

The troubles encountered by
The Good Soup
had more to do with circumstance than with the quality of their script. At that time, Monroe’s contract with Fox called for two more pictures. When the studio gave her a script called Something’s Got to Give, a remake of a 1940 Irene Dunne comedy, she indifferently agreed to do it and a starting date was set for the spring of 1962. Owing to her emotional disintegration, she proved incapable of sustained work and frequently absented herself from the set. Finally, in June, Fox fired her and suspended production on the film. Very shortly the question of whether or not Monroe would be reinstated or eventually go on to make another film became irrelevant because her life ended that August. The Good Soup was never produced.

Long before Monroe’s death, Dorothy and Alan had to face the fact that getting another film job would not be easy. Whenever The Good Soup was mentioned, Alan hurried to change the subject because, a friend recalled, “he knew that he and Dottie were dead at Twentieth.”

Instead of sharing Alan’s double bed, Dorothy preferred the front bedroom with its twin bed and a table where she had set up her typewriter. Even though it allowed some privacy, the house with its tiny rooms felt claustrophobic. During their months at the studio, progress on Alan’s home-improvement projects slowed down considerably. The unfinished kitchen where he had stripped tiles off the counter and torn out cabinets had fallen into a state of permanent rubble. Clara Lester, who had worked for the Eichel family in Richmond during Alan’s childhood, now lived in Hollywood and came in several times a week to clean and cook. She and Alan engaged in a running battle about the condition of the kitchen, since it was practically impossible to cook in there. “He was hard to work for,” Lester recalled, “because he was so fussy about every little thing. But Dorothy was different, so sweet and kind and she didn’t bother a soul.”

Dorothy regarded herself as a guest in the house. If the kitchen was cluttered, it made no difference to her. What she did mind was noise. On those days Alan worked on the repairs, she had to live with hammering. The racket in the house intensified when he decided to buy a dog, a bad-tempered male Sealyham terrier puppy whom he named Limey. It almost seemed as if he felt outnumbered by Dorothy and Cliché and sought an ally. Cliche objected strenuously to Limey. From the minute he entered the house, they were constantly at odds.

Dorothy did not feel entirely comfortable living in Norma Place. The house was Alan’s house, their friends his friends, the way of life one that suited his taste. Even neighborhood parties proved tricky. At one gathering, a young man fell on his knees before her in a reverent pose and placed a notebook of his writings in her lap. Dorothy failed to find his homage touching.

At a cocktail party given by Dana Woodbury, she entered the living room to be confronted by a life-sized nude portrait of her host, which had been painted by Christopher Isherwood’s talented protege, Don Bachardy. Woodbury handed her a cocktail, then asked what she thought of the painting. She gazed at it thoughtfully. She didn’t wish to offend Dana, who had once been a Buddhist monk. In the painting he was seated, facing front, and his genitals had been executed with remarkable attention to detail.

She finally cooed, “Oh, my dear, it’s so real, you almost feel it could speak to you.”

At another party, when some of the guests began gushing over “Big Blonde,” she fumed silently. A man standing nearby apologized for his ignorance of the story. “Miss Parker,” he confessed, “I’ve never read a word you’ve written.”

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Rothwell.”

“Well, Rothwell,” replied Dorothy, “keep it that way and we’ll be friends.”

The nonliterary Robert Rothwell, an acting student, appealed to her because he made no pretense to being an intellectual, did not live in Norma Place, and dated beautiful fashion models. Listening to him talk about his boyhood in Santa Barbara, where he had played basketball, was refreshing to her. Other people for whom she had warm feelings included Nina Foch; an old friend from the thirties, Sally Blane Foster; and actor Clement Brace, who had appeared in
The Ladies of the Corridor
. Brace lived across the street with his friend John Dall. She also exhibited maternal feelings toward a college boy named Noel Pugh, with whom she liked to whip around town in Alan’s Jaguar. To prepare for these outings, she wrapped a large scarf around her head because, she joked, she feared catching cold and dying. They drove by the Hollywood Ranch Market, where she claimed to be fascinated by a piece of California gadgetry, an immense clock whose hands never stopped revolving to indicate that the market never closed. It had been erected, she swore, as part of a cosmic plot to drive her insane. Whenever Saboteur happened to be playing in the area, she insisted Pugh take her to see it. It was not the film that drew her, but eagerness to watch herself on the screen in her cameo bit with Alfred Hitchcock. Saboteur, like all her pictures, heartily bored her. Once her scene was over she promptly nudged Pugh and announced that she was ready to leave.

A great many gay men lived in the neighborhood. Some of them went out of their ways to do her kindnesses, but she did not feel totally comfortable in homosexual society. Nevertheless, she tried to maintain good relations with her new gay friends and to retain her composure under all circumstances. Behind their backs, she made nasty digs and laughed that one of her more precious neighbors resembled Shirley Temple tossing her curls. Others she dismissed as “kiss-ass bores.”

The fact that Alan elected to make his home in Norma Place and that many of his friends were now homosexual seems to lend credibility to Dorothy’s old suspicions about him. Those who knew Alan at this time believed he was gay, although not sexually active. At parties, recalled Clement Brace, “He would always get drunk and make passes at all the boys,” but that was the extent of his activity. Said Dana Woodbury, “Never in the whole time I knew him did I see him do anything that was bisexual or homosexual. I don’t think he ever did.” Another friend thought that even if he did not sleep with men, he was attracted to them. “He was not a queen, in fact was very manly, but there was no doubt he was homosexual. Having that sort of mate suited Dorothy exactly. I don’t think she was ever very amorous. It was surprising how many gay people hung around their house, but it didn’t have to be that way. If she had wished, there could have been an entirely different crowd.”